Philologia is a peer-reviewed academic journal whose primary objective is to promote, cherish and advance research in the humanities and social science. The journal comes out annually, both in print and electronic edition. Philologia publishes articles, critical essays, book reviews, conference reports and translations grouped into the following sections: Emeritus, Language Science, Language Teaching Methodology, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Translation Studies, Reviews and Reports. The journal also includes information on the most recent publications in the scientific fields it promotes as well as conference calls for papers. This sixth issue of the Philologia journal proudly offers to its readership nearly 30 contributions submitted by the scholars from all over the world on a wide range of topics. Both synchronic and diachronic philological viewpoints on languages, literatures and cultural matters are expressed. Various innovative philological and non-philological theory-based and practical perspectives come from Algeria, Montenegro, Morocco, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Serbia. The Emerita Section presents an article on Margaret Atwood's literary work, as seen by the distinguished Canadian scholar, Michelle Gadpaille of University of Maribor. Prof. Gadpaille's paper merges gender studies and cultural studies with the literary science in order to expound narrative techniques Atwood employs to incorporate the female body into cultural and political discourse. The Editorial thanks Dr. Gadpaille for her efficiency, her eagerness to contribute and all support she showed during our co-operation. We are also much obliged to both international and Serbian reviewers for their insightful comments, constant effort and constructive criticism, without whose help this issue of the Philologia journal could not have been presented to the readership in this form. Special thanks go to the Serbian Ministry of Science for providing continual financial assistance.

in the 1980s and 90s a gap appeared in the rank of feminist literary theorists. on one side were the essentialists, and on the other the constructivists, and between them lay a woman's body. some french theorists maintained that woman's writing was a bodily experience, not divorced from the body as the postenlightenment tradition would have it. &quot;write yourself. your body must be heard,&quot; said Hélène cixous (cixous 2001: 2043). in contrast, there was monique wittig's non-essentialist stance, while Judith Butler gave the literary world gender as construction, even as performance. long before Butler's Undoing Gender (2004), Bodies That Matter (1993), and Gender Trouble (1990), margaret Atwood had been deconstructing gender forms in her work. starting with The Edible Woman in 1969, Surfacing (1972), Cat's Eye (1982), Bluebeard's Egg (1983) and The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and including the more recent works, Moral Disorder (2006) and The Tent (2006), Atwood's writing demonstrated that gender is, as Butler affirms, a cumulative performance communicated to society at large through a system of socially-constituted signs in behaviour, dress, and language, including the silent languages of the body. This paper will propose a taxonomy of gender performance as evident in a range of Atwood's fiction, particularly in the early fiction, where the social and political tussle over women's bodies is powerfully enacted. Atwood's first-person narratives construct the world as a text read from the perspective of the body with a frankness that was refreshing for its time. Her narrators name unnameable body parts, while registering a 20th-century dissatisfaction with the body gaps of earlier literature. The protagonist of Surfacing, for example, challenges the flat constitution of the heroine's body in fairy tales: The [fairy tales] never revealed the essential things about them [i.e. princesses], such as what they ate or whether their towers and dungeons had bathrooms. it was as though their bodies were pure air. it wasn't Peter Pan's ability to fly that made him incredible for me, it was the lack of an outhouse near his underground burrow. (Atwood 1994: 53-54) Here the surprising redefinitions of what is &quot;essential&quot; establish a naïve, retrospective point of view. This is perceptual sophistication presented as obtuseness, or even social and literary retardation. Atwood's narrators have had

A tA xonom y of GE n dE r r E Pr E sE n tAt ion

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childhoods of perpetual puzzlement, unable to take anything for granted about language, literature or the body. one might expect this to translate into biologically frank prose. in the vogue for confessional writing at the time (e.g. mailer, roth, miller, Jong), the body played a starring role; as one critic says, &quot;contemporary women protagonists are positively garrulous about their intimate personal histories. Everything must and can be told&quot; (coward 1997: 29). women writers such as Erika Jong and maxine Hong Kingston insisted on their access to a complete--if &quot;unladylike&quot;--language of the body (showalter 1990: 572). The Jong type of body language is occasionally uttered by characters such as Anna in Surfacing. The heavily made-up friend of the protagonist is coy about four-letter words, and her usage is not condoned, but presented as part of her insecurity with her image and role. in Atwood, however, one sees an alien frankness when marian from The Edible Woman visits her pregnant friend, clara: clara's body is so thin that her pregnancies are always bulgingly obvious, and now in her seventh month she looked like a boa-constrictor that has swallowed a watermelon. ... she lay back in her chair and closed her eyes, looking like a strange vegetable growth, a bulbous tuber that had sent out four thin white roots and a tiny pale-yellow flower. (Atwood 1978: 31) This grotesque image of a pregnant woman left women readers suspecting that this might be misogynistic critique. certainly, the mothering body recedes through these organic metaphors into the realms of irrationality and non-being that cixous identifies among the categories to which the feminine is relegated by patriarchal discourse. However, placing clara in the context of other maternal bodies in Atwood's oeuvre (the pregnant older mother in &quot;The Art of cooking and serving,&quot; for example) adds nuance to the black humour of this picture. This kind of metaphorical extravagance can be seen as a form of irreverence that counters the presentation of motherhood as sacred ritual in The Handmaid's Tale, where the fundamentalist state of Gilead has made containers out of women's bodies: &quot;we are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important. The outside can become hard and wrinkled, for all they care, like the shell of a nut&quot; (Atwood 1985: 107). Here Atwood criticises the fundamentalist rationalisation of biological destiny, which makes female bodies into sacral vessels which can be manipulated through taboos and sacrifices in the name of divine power. Atwood is careful, however, to balance this critique with an analysis of western culture's objectivization of the female body. As offred leafs through the women's magazines in the commander's office, a link emerges between commodification through the discourses of fashion and the reproductive commodification of Gilead. 1980s north America interpellated women's bodies in the name of health as well as fashion: breast feeding, for instance, became mandatory--failure to breast feed, a social crime. The Handmaids, as the plot clarifies, are merely the daughters of babyboomers, their bodies co-opted for a different struggle. subject to an essentialist reading of the female body, offred becomes repulsed by her own body: &quot;i avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because i don't want to see it. i don't want to look at

something that determines me so completely&quot; (ibid. 72-73). Boa-constrictor clara is also determined by her body and its pregnant state, but she represents a parodic inversion of the maternal vessel. with these tropes, Atwood challenges a metanarrative about the madonna role for women; wrapped in marian's metaphors, clara may be medusa or mangel-wurzel, but never madonna. further grotesque bodies appear through the naive perceptions of Elaine in Cat's Eye. to her child's eyes, women's bodies are both foreign and repulsive: &quot;i haven't thought much about grown-up women's bodies before. But now these bodies are revealed in their true, upsetting light: alien, and bizarre, hairy, squashy, monstrous&quot; (Atwood 1990: 97). Atwood's female body is not the synthetic product peddled by the media, but a complex, warty construct and is viewed by the girl characters of Cat's Eye with double fear because it represents a metamorphosis that they will be expected to embrace. Joan, in Lady Oracle, hoards her similar knowledge of the body as &quot;the secret that i alone know: my mother was a monster&quot; (Atwood 1998: 67). These early extravagant, seemingly misogynistic tropes signal a return to an almost child-like way of perceiving the adult body, from a position of difference, but not of complete otherness, since the child perceives the threat of mutation in its own future. At the same time, this grotesque body hovers close to the caegory of the abject--the physically and politically unspeakable realm for which Atwood begins to provide a discourse enabling projection as a body politic. That such monstrous construction begins in girlhood signals the near-impossibility of retrieving any essential, pre-cultural body for women, despite the trends of &quot;naturalness&quot; in fashion, diet and lifestyle that marked these decades. An important part of Atwood's body politic is linguistic. twentieth century linguistics progressively revealed the sexist nature of language (e.g. dale spender's Man Made Language 1980), and Atwood's early prose challenges several key terms to expose the arbitrary nature of their signification. The word lady provides a useful example. Here is the protagonist from Surfacing seeking her self and her past in the family scrapbooks:

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The next scrapbook was mine . . . but there were no drawings at all, just illustrations cut from magazines and pasted in. They were ladies, all kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modelling toeless high heels and nylons with dark seams and pillbox hats and veils. A lady was what you . . . said at school when they asked you what you were going to be when you grew up, you said &quot;A lady&quot; or &quot;A mother,&quot; either one was safe; and it wasn't a lie, i did want to be those things. on some of the pages were women's dresses clipped from mail order catalogues, no bodies in them. (Atwood 1994: 90-91) Having established a socially constituted image of the lady, Atwood demonstrates how a linguistic construct can signal derogation, as david accosts the protagonist irreverently: &quot;Hey lady . . . what're you doing in my bed? you a customer or something?&quot; (ibid. 91). The era in which lady meant what is represented in the clippings lies in the past. The word has become almost a term of abuse, which david uses sarcastically. His question suggests that the protagonist

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may be looking for sex-that the lady is a tramp-and even connotes, in the phrase &quot;or something,&quot; that she might be selling it. sixties slang has subverted the distinction between prostitute and lady, revealing that the distinction was based on a surface with little underneath, like a constumed body with no undergarments, or, more troublingly, no body at all. The bodiless garments from the sales catalogue assert the intrinsic emptiness of the `lady' category-the body is irrelevant to such categorisation. &quot;lady&quot; is a socally convenient construct, one that does not depend radically on the body. ladyhood becomes a form of drag. Atwood thus presents a schema revealing the constructed nature of a defining gender word of the day. Surfacing, then, is an early Atwood novel in which an extreme negation of the female body, almost an abnegation, marks the author's reaction to previous cultural and political events in north America-for example, the advent of the contraceptive pill or roe vs. wade. culture in the late twentieth century was reshaping the female body, moving it away from biological determinism but towards a precarious existence as a layered construct, almost a &quot;chemical slot machine&quot; (Atwood 1994:80). This constitutes one meaning behind the act of &quot;surfacing&quot; in Atwood's title. in performing a socially acceptable gender masquerade, Atwood's female characters--particularly those from the pre-1985 novels-often exhibit split perceptions of the body and its relation to the self. These characters all experience a form of divorce from either their names, or their bodies, or the discourse of media femininity. The split in perception produces the contradictions we have established-that women's bodies can be both fleshy and insubstantial, present and absent, named and unnameable. in order to negotiate these contradictions constructively, i propose a taxonomy of textual strategies for representing the body in Atwood's fiction. starting from cixous's list of categories of relegation for the feminine--lack, negativity, absence of meaning, irrationality, chaos, darkness and non-being--i have isolated six roughly corresponding narrative techniques for represention, under-representation or non-representation of the female body. The constructed nature of gender in these texts necessitates a range of techniques: metaphorical, metonymic, iconic and synecdoche-based. The first technique, camouflage, is a metonymical form of construction, where the body is represented by items linked to it by cultural convention. These are often clothes, as in the case of the protagonist of &quot;Hurricane Hazel&quot;: The year . . . i . . . entered high school, . . . i took to sewing my own clothes, out of patterns i bought at Eaton's. The clothes never came out looking like the pictures on the pattern envelopes; also they were too big. i must have been making them the size i wanted to be. (Atwood 1984: 38-39) The technique is given its name by Ainsley, the anti-heroine of The Edible Woman: &quot;Ainsley says i choose clothes as though they're a camouflage or a protective colouration&quot; (Atwood 1978: 6). The female body represents itself as female by donning a culturally-approved costume. Atwood also clarifies that bodily masquerade can be permanent, as in the case of lesje in Life Before Man, who goes

clothes shopping: &quot;she flips through the racks, looking for something that might become her, something she might become&quot; (Atwood 1980: 18). in Lady Oracle, Joan acknowledges the camouflage value of hair: &quot;[H]air in the female was regarded as more important than either talent or the lack of it. . .. They could trace my hair much more easily than they could trace me&quot; (Atwood 1998: 11). At least this protagonist still asserts a &quot;me&quot; behind the camouflage of red hair. such typical protagonists reflect a prevailing sense that women are cultural constructions, continually engaged in impersonating themselves with the help of western commodities. cross-dressing theorists such as Garber support this position, maintaining that &quot;womanliness is mimicry, is masquerade&quot; (Garber 1997: 166). in contrast, the masquerade solidifies in the case of Anna in Surfacing, who gets up early to put on makeup before the others at the cottage are awake (Atwood 1994: 43-44). This incident points to another meaning of the word &quot;surfacing&quot;: not so much coming up from beneath, but putting a surface on the top. Being a &quot;lady&quot; meant a smooth, gendered act of surfacing. This is the performance of gender that most early Atwood heroines are not good at and eventually look beneath, seeking an essential body that becomes progressively less available. for those characters whose sense of self stretches cultural categories, the surface remains camouflage and being female a risky act performed in enemy territory. There are various narrative techniques for lifting these carefully-crafted gender surfaces, usually achieved with Atwood's metamorphic language. Elizabeth in Life Before Man provides clear examples of both surface camouflage and female interior: &quot;i want a shell like a sequined dress, made of silver nickels and dimes and dollars overlapping like the scales of an armadillo. impermeable;&quot; and &quot;most people do imitations; she herself has been doing imitations for years&quot; (Atwood 1980: 3; 199). A second metonymic technique can be called erasure. Here is Atwood's narrator describing the character marylynn in &quot;Bluebeard's Egg&quot;: marylynn is tall and elegant, and makes anything she is wearing seem fashionable. Her hair is prematurely grey and she leaves it that way. she goes in for loose blouses in cream-coloured silk, and eccentric scarves gathered from interesting shops and odd corners of the world, thrown carelessly around her neck and over one shoulder. (Atwood 1983:136) following a rapid glance at the physical body (two adjectives: tall and grey, two nouns, a bit of neck and one shoulder) the description detours through clothing, and manner. marylynn is all constructed. Her body almost does not exist inside the cultural trappings. Thus the plot surprise when Ed is seen fondling marylynn's ass--the metonymically-constructed woman of that class and age shouldn't have an ass, but a body missing in action, as in the paper cut-outs from the child's scrapbook of Surfacing. with the strategy of distortion, we move to a set of techniques based on metaphor. Atwood often has her heroines experience literal bodily change in shape or size. in a tone of calm absurdity reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, the female body shrinks and grows in uncontrollable ways. The best example is the fat-to-thin

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story in Lady Oracle: &quot;There, staring me in the face, was my thigh. it was enormous, it was gross, it was like a diseased limb, the kind you see in pictures of jungle natives; it spread on forever, like a prairie photographed from a plane, the flesh not green but bluish-white, with veins meandering across it like rivers. it was the size of three ordinary thighs&quot; (Atwood 1998: 126). Joan is caught in one of the abject, unlovable bodies that Butler theorizes at the level of the unarticulable. However, Atwood's plot awards Joan an escape from the body, one that mirrors the kind of escape granted by the romance fiction that Joan reads and writes: &quot;i knew all about escape, i was brought up on it&quot; (Atwood 1998: 33). only by embracing narrative techniques from both pre- and post-realist writing can the narrative successfully transcend the body, countering a gendered construct by the post-modern deconstruction of a parallel literary construct. The grotesque, uncontrollable body intrudes, however, into the perceptions of even Atwood's more realistic heroines, as with marian from The Edible Woman: marian gazed down at the small silvery image reflected in the bowl of the spoon: herself upside down, with a huge torso narrowing to a pinhead at the handle end. she tilted the spoon and her forehead swelled, then receded. she felt serene. (Atwood 1978: 148)

similar distortions occupy the field in children's drawings-- Life before Man, Surfacing-- where naive graphic representations stand for perceptual distortion. A more sophisticated symbolic visual distortion occurs in Cat's Eye, where the artist Elaine risley paints mrs. smeath in a variety of monstrous guises that stand for visionary truths.1 A special form of distortion can be called dissolution, which occurs with sufficient frequency to merit a category of its own. Atwood links the motif to the world of current science, from which she draws many of her tropes: All the molecular materials now present in the earth and its atmosphere were present at the creation of the earth itself. . .. These molecular materials have merely combined, disintegrated, recombined. Although a few molecules and atoms have escaped into space, nothing has been added. lesje contemplates this fact, which she finds soothing. she is only a pattern. she is not an immutable object. There are no immutable objects. some day she will dissolve. (Atwood 1980: 153) significantly, lesje's meditation is triggered by a child's drawing of a girl. The visual blobbiness and blurring of the child's construct belong in the category of distortion, but morph into dissolution through the lens of adulthood. dissolution sometimes has a more domestic face: &quot;marian dreams that her feet are beginning to dissolve like melting jelly and that she has to put on rubber boots, only to find that the ends of her fingers are becoming transparent&quot; (Atwood 1978: 39). dissolution terminates in the unspooling of a life in the recent &quot;life stories,&quot; where a flippant narrative voice deliberately destroys the constructed album of life memories (Atwood 2006: 3-5). &quot;Adolescence can be discarded too,

with its salty tanned skin, its fecklessness and bad romance and leakages of seasonal blood... . i'm getting somewhere now, i'm feeling lighter, i'm coming unstuck from scrapbooks, from albums, from diaries and journals, from space, from time&quot; (ibid. 4-5). The technique based on synecdoche is dismemberment. Atwood's female bodies tend to appear in pieces. sometimes this is presented as a distortion of perception, as when Ainsley appears as a pair of naked legs in The Edible Woman (Atwood 1978: 117). The dismemberment motif reappears in the recent story &quot;The Art of cooking and serving,&quot; where the baby's layette is knitted with significant parts and limbs missing (Atwood 2006: 15-16). The technique both captures psychological fears and mirrors cultural commodification of female body parts. The sixth narrative technique is displacement, a trope that uses iconicity, where the body remains unrepresented while its image is displaced onto something else. such iconic representation is most identifiable in items such as the Barbara Ann scott doll from the protagonist's past in Surfacing &quot;[w]hen i was ten i believed in glamour, it was a kind of religion and these were my icons&quot; (Atwood 1994: 42). more grotesquely, there is the sponge-cake woman in The Edible Woman, which functions for the protagonist as a means of clarifying her reading of the consumer transaction of marriage. These conceits proliferate in Atwood's early fiction, where, like other writers, she replicates familiar antithetical categories, what terry Eagleton calls the &quot;binary habit of thought&quot; at which post-structuralism takes aim: flesh/mind; solid/ mutable; proper/improper; norm/deviation; sane/mad, and authority/obedience (Eagleton 1983: 133). These narrative methods can be seen as symptoms of the ruling conventions of representation of the feminine. woman is chaos, darkness and non-being--the figure that marks the margin and recedes into it (moi 1997: 112). As such, Atwood's body politic appears conservative, merely the recognition of conventional ways of representing bodies and selves. However, one can also see Atwood's body politic as a marker of changing cultural representation. like the pathologies (hysteria, anorexia, agoraphobia) that susan Bordo reads as women's strategies for inserting their bodies permissibly into public discourse (Bordo 1993: 2365), Atwood's six rhetorical techniques permit voice to the unspeakable--not in medical discourse, but in the space of literary play. in appropriating the language and concepts of science (molecules, boa-constrictors, protective coloration), Atwood re-examines the performance of femininity in response to the shifting cultural focus on bodies of all kinds.

This article applies Butler's concepts of gender as construction and performance to a selection of fiction by margaret Atwood. By using binary categories inspired by the theory of Eagleton and cixous, the author proposes a taxonomy of narrative techniques employed by Atwood to embed the female body into cultural and political discourse. KEYWORDS: margaret Atwood, gender, female body in fiction. BRIEF CV Michelle Gadpaille, Associate Professor, department of English and American studies, faculty of Arts, maribor, slovenia, received her B.A. degree from yale University, her m.A. degree from the University of western ontario, and a Ph.d. from the University of toronto. most of her research and publication has focused on 19th-century canadian writing, canadian fiction and short fiction,

and women's studies. she is the director of the canadian studies institute in maribor, slovenia. c oU r sE s tAUGH t: canadian short story, University of toronto canadian fiction, University of toronto canadian literature, University of toronto renaissance Prose and Poetry, University of toronto 20th-century American literature, University of maribor world literatures in English, University of maribor shakespeare and the Elizabethans, University of maribor children's literature in English, University of maribor intercultural studies for translators, University of maribor Postmodernism, Graduate Programme, University of maribor The long Poem, Graduate Programme, University of maribor The canadian short story, Graduate Programme, University of maribor c A nA di A n s t U di E s PU Bl ic At ions:

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The Canadian Short Story. oxford: oxford University Press, 1988. novels in English 1960-1982: other talents, other works.&quot; The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, ed. william toye. toronto: oxford University Press, 1983, 587-594. Contributions to Canadian Selections: Books and Periodicals for Libraries. Eds. mavis cariou, sandra cox and Alvan Bregman. toronto: University of toronto Press, 1985. &quot;canadian short fiction.&quot; Critical Survey of Short Fiction. 2nd revised ed. Pasadena, cA: salem Press, 2001, 2898-2907. &quot;odalisques in margaret Atwood's cat's Eye.&quot; Metaphor &amp; Symbolic Activity 8.3, 1993, 221-26. &quot;if the dress fits: female stereotyping in rosanna leprohon's `Alice sydenham's first Ball&quot;. Canadian Literature 146, 1995: 68-83. &quot;metaphorical levels in margaret Atwood's Alias Grace.&quot; in Canada and the Millennium, ed. Anna Jakabfi. Budapest, 1999. &quot;Gynocritics and the nineteenth-century north American canon.&quot; in Aspects of Interculturality: Canada and the United States. Eds. fritz Peter Kirsch and waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Vienna, 2002. &quot;tropes of transition: words, memory and the immigrant Experience.&quot; in Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism. frankfurt: Peter lang, 2004. &quot;metaphor and meme in maclennan's Two Solitudes.&quot; in Individual and Community: Canada in the 20th Century. Brno, 2004. &quot;coming to canada: The Early life of a Virtual space.&quot; in Virtual Canada. Baia mare, 2007. &quot;Emigration Gothic: A scotswoman's contribution to the new world.&quot; ELOPE iii, 2007. &quot;Psyche's daughter of today: sara Jeannette duncan and the new woman.&quot; ELOPE iV, 2008.

1. IntroductIon modality is undoubtedly one of the most widely studied issues in english as illustrated by the extensive bibliography devoted to this topic and exemplified by already classical studies such as those published by coates (1983), Perkins (1983), Palmer (1990), westney (1995), bybee and fleischman (1995) or Papafragou (2000), as well as more recent compilations of works on the subject, such as facchinetti, Krug and Palmer (2003), facchinetti and Palmer (2004) and marín arrese (2004), among many others. The study of modality has concentrated not only on modal auxiliaries but also on other modal expressions such as modal adverbs. furthermore, much more recent studies about modal adverbs such as those published by hoye (1997) or downing's (2001) detailed work on surely illustrate the fact that these adverbs are still a matter of high interest among linguists and deserve further and deeper analysis. Nevertheless, these studies have mainly focused on synchronic aspects while for the most part neglecting the diachronic evolution of modal adverbs; i.e. the way in which modal adverbs have adopted new meanings or different nuances of meaning while others have been progressively abandoned. The present paper is aimed at analysing a particular case within the group of modal adverbs: certainly and its diachronic evolution from the 19th century onwards. in doing so, we will be working within the well-established tradition of the study of modal adverbs while adopting a diachronic point of view. it should be pointed out, however, that this study presents a preliminary analysis which forms part of a more extensive project including both larger amounts of text and other modal adverbs1. The paper is divided into four main sections. The following section focuses on the description of the corpus used for the analysis. section three briefly revises the most important theoretical aspects concerning both modality and modal adverbs. section four presents the analysis of the data as well as a suggested classification based on previous studies and on the data proper before reaching our concluding section.

Towards a diachroNic sTudy

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(i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

2 . c o r pu s of data

Taking simpson and weiner's 1991 edition of the Oxford english Dictionary (OeD henceforth) as one of its points of departure, the present study is based on a corpus consisting of approximately 713,000 words and including six different novels from the 19th century onwards.2 The corpus includes three 19th century novels, namely Jane austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), emily brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and henry James' Portrait of a lady (1882) and three contemporary novels, namely michael ondaatje's The english Patient (1993), marian Keyes' Sushi for Beginners (2000) and dan brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003), which constitute a sample of present-day english. The selection of the novels has been mostly arbitrary and based on the availability of electronic copies. it should be pointed out that although all the examples are to be found in written texts, a great deal appear in dialogues between the different characters. although we are well aware that these dialogues may not exactly reflect naturally occurring spoken discourse, this should not affect the present analysis, since our aim is not to analyse the differences between written and spoken english or between the different varieties of english regarding the use of certainly but to observe its diachronic evolution while contrasting the examples from the 19th century with contemporary ones. 3. t h e or et Ic a l f r a m e wor k in general terms, the use of modal verbs and other expressions conveying modality, e.g. modal adverbs, is a powerful tool in english for addressers (speakers or writers) to modify their declarative clauses and thus include different nuances of meaning by conveying a particular attitude towards what is being communicated (carretero et al. 2007). modality can be quite an elusive concept to define as Palmer (1990) points out. The following definition by downing and locke, however, captures some of the features traditionally associated with modality &quot;as a semantic category which covers such notions as possibility, probability, necessity, volition, obligation and permission&quot; (1992: 382 and 2006: 380). more concretely, it is possible to distinguish four main types of modality (carretero et al. 2007): &quot;epistemic modality concerning different degrees of probability.&quot; &quot;Deontic modality: concerning different degrees of obligation.&quot; &quot;Dynamic modality: concerning different degrees of predisposition (ability-tendency).&quot; &quot;Boulomaic modality: concerning different degrees of volition/wish.&quot;

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modal verbs are probably one of the most important ways to express modality in english, although non-factual verbs are frequent too, e.g. I suppose, I believe and especially I think (Kärkkäinen 2003). modality can also be expressed by other means such as modal adjectives, e.g. possible or likely, modal nouns, e.g. chance, likelihood or probability and modal adverbs such as the one under analysis in the present paper: the epistemic adverb certainly.

with regard to the meaning of certainly, the OeD (1991: vol. xvii, page 1052), which dates the first written record back to the year 1300, lists four main entries, namely3: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) &quot;in a manner that is certain; in a way that may be surely depended on, with certainty.&quot; &quot;without fail, unfailingly, infallibly.&quot; &quot;with subjective certitude, with assurance, surely.&quot; &quot;parenthetically, or as an assurance or admission of the truth of an assertion as a whole.&quot;

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in turn, the Collins Cobuild english language Dictionary (1987: 222) also includes the prototypically epistemic meaning in its first entry: &quot;something that is certainly true is true without any doubt&quot; but it provides a more specific definition when considering other uses of the modal adverb, namely: (i) &quot;to emphasize that you feel strongly about what you are saying.&quot; a. &quot;to emphasize that you agree with a particular statement, idea or theory that has just been stated or discussed.&quot; b. &quot;to say enthusiastically that you will do something you have been asked to do (i.e. it is a synonym of `of course')&quot; &quot;when answering a question in a strong way. if used together with the negative `not', then it can also express annoyance.&quot;

(ii)

in our study, the categorization of the different uses of certainly will prove to be more in the line of this latter classification as will be seen in the next section. This classification will be then followed by the analysis of its diachronic evolution by focusing on three main aspects: a. b. c. appearance of new uses (if any). disappearance of uses (if any). frequency of use in the different periods under analysis.

4 . a na lys I s a n d I n t e r pr e tat Io n of data although the number of works consulted so far makes any interpretation highly tentative, a number of patterns stand out which deserve our attention. we must start by pointing out the wide range of meanings of certainly identified among the 248 instances of the adverb found. This is not surprising since, as seen above, the literature on modality reflects the polysemous nature of modal elements in general and of certainly in particular. we start by showing, in table 1, the seven uses of certainly suggested by close examination of the data handled. The categorization of the different uses is based on aspects such as the co-text in which the examples appear, both at sentence and discourse level. as shown, those seven uses can be grouped under four larger categories ­ ultimately reducible to two, i.e. epistemic proper and other epistemic ­ which brings our classification closer to what is found

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uses: general classification epistemic proper other epistemic uses

elsewhere in the literature. Thus, besides the prototypical4 epistemic use of the adverb under consideration, the two meanings as response in adjacency pairs, for instance, remind of the OeD's claim that certainly &quot;often...conveys a strong assent or affirmative reply, as in `you were present?' `certainly.' `can you recommend him?' `certainly'&quot; (1991: 1052). The difference is that here we make a further distinction between replying to a question or responding to a statement, in which case the adverb stands for a short answer of the kind I do or it is, and assenting to a request, where it is more similar to of course. uses: more delicate uses: most delicate examples classification classification &quot;Mr. langdon,&quot; Fache said, ,,certainly a man like yourself is aware that leonardo da Vinci had a tendency toward the darker arts. (DV) response in To requests `Can I have a word?' adjacency-pair `Certainly' (sb) To questions or `Do you call it an statements interest?' `Certainly' (Pl) emphasis on `and I certainly booster commitment never shall give it' (PP) emphasis on truth- Her sixty-year-old value body did not awake as fast as it used to, although tonight's phone call had certainly roused her senses. (dv) agreement real `It's a very fine country on the whole... I certainly feel more at home...' (Pl) concessive `you ought certainly to forgive them as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight.' (PP)

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Table 1: uses of certainly in our corpus5

(1) (2) (3)

while ashling certainly had bitchy thoughts, she rarely gave vent to them (sb). it certainly went a long way toward explaining the captain's suspicions about devil worship (dv). `i hope you have destroyed the letter'[...] `The letter shall certainly be burnt, if you believe it essential to the preservation of my regard' (PP).

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our corpus-based classification is also reminiscent of other works in the literature regarding certainly as a booster (after holmes 1982: 18), where its uses to emphasize commitment on the part of the addresser as well as on truth value closely resemble the analyses by hoye (1997: 121, 157, respectively). finally, wierzbicka makes the claim that certainly on occasions &quot;is used to agree, or to partially agree, with what has been said before&quot; (2006: 205). our interpretation differs in that wierzbicka identifies this use only in sentence-initial position, whereas our data show that this meaning may occur with clause-internal certainly. The use of the adverb to express concessive agreement in our classification corresponds with hoye's recognition of concessive certainly (1997: 191), typically followed by but (see also OeD 1991: 1052; downing 2001: 275). Table 2 shows the frequency of the different uses of certainly in the six novels consulted. The data seem to point to a wider range of meanings exploited in the earlier works, i.e. Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and The Portrait of a lady. in these, the adverb certainly is found in all of the uses specified in table 1, save for concessive meaning in Wuthering Heights and response to requests in Pride and Prejudice. conversely, the three contemporary novels under scrutiny seem to disregard the use of certainly to express commitment, concessive meaning or as a response in an adjacency pair of either kind. although the lack of concessive certainly in these novels has as a by-product that the structure certainly...but ceases to appear, there still seems to be a concessive flavour of sorts in example (1), from Sushi for Beginners, although we take the adverb in this example to have a primarily emphatic meaning. This, incidentally, points to a pervasive phenomenon in the use of certainly: it often is hard to ascertain to which of the categories from table 1 it corresponds; different shades of meaning may intertwine to result in a complex category. This is particularly true regarding agreement and emphasis, as shown in (2) and (3), where both features appear to be present simultaneously; certainly in these examples seems to emphasize the truth-value not only of the elements next to it but also of preceding discourse.

21

22

Novel Tokens ratio*

epistemic after proper

after statements

emphasis

emphasis agreement concessive value

requests questions /

commitment truth-

wh 16

1/4981

4 20 31

1 0 4 0 1 0

1 5 5 0 0 0

2 10 11 0 0 0

4 10 24 1 5 6

4 17 22 0 1 6

0 10 17 0 0 0

PP

72

1/1718

Pl

114

1/1971

eP

1

1/83117 0 0 26

sb

7

1/6758 1/4060

dv 38

Table 2: Types and tokens of certainly in our corpus (*the ratio column indicates the total number of words per each occurrence of certainly; the higher the number after the slash, the lower the frequency of certainly). 5. conclusIons and poInters to the future although the number and dialectal heterogeneity of the works so far inspected do not invite the elaboration of solid claims at this early stage, they do seem to hint at some tendencies that will be corroborated by the addition of other texts to our corpus, on which we are working at present. 6 Notably, the data handled in this first approximation reveals that, among the seven meanings of certainly, three of them are the most constant across time, namely the prototypical epistemic meaning ­ the most abundant overall albeit not pervasive ­ and the uses of the adverb to show agreement or emphasis, when not both at the same time. To conclude we can advance an interpretation of the results obtained: the most constant meanings of certainly ­ i.e. epistemic proper, emphasis on truthvalue and agreement ­ are precisely the less dependent on turn-taking. agreement is the most susceptible of the three to depend on a previous turn but it is often the case that the agreement is with something within the same turn, as in the example illustrating agreement in table 1. The other four meanings ­ i.e. emphasis on commitment, concession and the responses in the two types of adjacency pairs ­ are to be expected in conversation rather than in monologue; in fact they tend to appear in dialogical fragments of the novels studied. The fact that these meanings of the adverb occur mostly in the earlier novels may allow us to draw the conclusion that certainly has undergone some sort of specialization, its use having more of an intra-clausal than a discursive value, save for conversational agreement, i.e. agreement with a previous turn. we will have to check in future work whether the scarcity of instances of certainly in the only canadian novel, The english Patient, is symptomatic of a dialectal trait or simply of personal choice. in turn, the almost exclusive use of

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certainly by marian Keyes, author of Sushi for Beginners, as an emphasizer of truthvalue points to an idiosyncratic, rather than dialectal, use. we should remind the reader at this point, though, that different meanings of certainly are often combined in a single use of the adverb, which allows for the epistemic meaning to be felt to a greater or a lesser degree on most occasions. we have to disagree with wierzbicka (2006: 205), then, when she claims that when certainly is conversational it is not an epistemic adverb at all: borrowing the idea of prototype from cognitive linguistics, we can say that certainly has more or less prototypical epistemic uses, but the effect of its focal meaning ­i.e. epistemic proper ­ is always felt. figure 1 illustrates this point and serves as a wrap-up.

1 we would like to thank our project colleagues angela downing, marta carretero and Juan rafael Zamorano for their kind and insightful suggestions. responsibility for mistakes remains exclusively ours. 2 we are well aware that two centuries may be considered a short time for a diachronic study. our study starts with this short time span so as to identify general tendencies that can be later on validated ­ or discarded ­ by looking at older texts. 3 Non-epistemic meanings of certainly such as exactly do not appear in our corpus. we have, therefore, not included them in the present study. 4 by &quot;prototypical&quot; use, we are referring to the theory of prototypes, according to which a prototype is the core example of a category since it has all the defining features of this category. less prototypical examples, therefore, are those that have just some of the features that define the category to which they belong. 5 The abbreviations in table 1 and elsewhere stand for the following titles: dv (The Da Vinci Code), sb (Sushi for Beginners), Pl (The Portrait of a lady), PP (Pride and Prejudice), wh (Wuthering Heights) and eP (The english Patient). 6 Pending quantification, we can anticipate that the data collected for the extension of our corpus seem to point in the same direction as those here presented.

de madrid. as the analysis will show, there has been a progressive specialization of certainly, its use having more of an intra-clausal than a discursive value, save for conversational agreement, i.e. agreement with a previous turn. KeYwoRdS: modality, modal adverbs, diachronic analysis, certainly.

IntroductIon with the inception of the `sociology of language' at the beginning of the 1960's, `arabic' sociolinguistics emerged as an important discipline and field of study. however, variationist models, such as those proposed by william labov (1966) are not completely verified in arabic speech communities. associations that exist between linguistic forms and their social correlates in the western world are not the same in the middle-east and North africa. Post-colonial arab countries hastened the education of their countrymen through compulsory systems of education. economic development, industrialisation, modernity, and urbanisation have also played a significant role in enhancing and accelerating change in the arab world. with the shifts of demographics, new patterns of linguistic behaviour emerged, and new tendencies took place. These factors account for the fact that some models of sociolinguistic variation are not always applicable to the arab world. arab speech communities are not only linguistically different from their european and american counterparts, but they also have their own social and cultural characteristics. The correlation that exists between arab social categories and linguistic forms is evidence that arabic sociolinguistics does not parallel with that of the rest of the world. Through speech, the arabs set relations of distance and intimacy that go beyond the fact of setting interrelationships; they act as sociolinguistic rules of address and as social barriers. 1. methods and samplInG in the next sections, we apply and verify the hypotheses of communication accommodation Theory (caT) (cf. Giles and smith 1979) and speech accommodation theory (saT) (cf. Giles, Taylor, and bourhis 1973; Giles and Powesland 1975; Giles 1984) within an arabic diglossic speech community: adrar. we follow the field research methods of both a. bell (1982a &amp; b, 1983) and al-Khatib (1995 and 2001). we consider the consonant phonemes /q/ and /g/ as phonological variants which have social correlates, i.e. `educated' versus `less-

a N d saT To a N a r a bic d i G l o s s i c s i T uaT i o N : The local r adio of adr ar

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educated/illiterate' styles of speech. The situation chosen to verify caT and saT models is adrar local radio broadcasting system. we use radio-tape recorded material from a number of programs. we split the recorded people into dyads made up of male and female participants; then we compare the scores obtained in each program/dyad to check whether the scores vary according to the sex/gender of speaker, or according to the topic. social status is also taken into consideration, for it is significant both on the sociological as well as the psychological level of each individual speaker (cf. Thakerar, Giles, and cheshire 1982) Through the scores and results, we confirm haeri's (1997a, 1997b, and 2000) hypothesis which says that arab women are linguistically `innovative' and more `conservative' than men. on the other hand, we show that labov's (1966: 210) model of variation, which asserts that men use more non-standard forms than women, is not well verified in an arabic speaking community. The recoded material consists of the following programs and people: Program 1: &quot;agriculture Problems in the wilaya of adrar&quot;. The presenter is female and the participants are two males. The first is an agriculture engineer; the second is the director of agriculture services of adrar. The duration of the whole program is about one hour, and our recording lasts for 17.33 minutes. Program 2: &quot;The charity associations of adrar&quot;. The presenter is a male and the participants are a man and a woman. The female participant is the General secretary of a charity association in adrar, and the male is a representative of the red crescent in adrar and is also the director of the regional office for social affairs. The duration of the program is one hour, while our recording takes about 10 minutes. Program 3: &quot;a Glimpse at the social community&quot;. The program is presented by a man. The first guest is the General secretary of the local charity association of Program 2. The second guest, a male, is a representative of the regional office for social affairs. Three phone-in participants are also involved in the program: two women and an old man. The recording lasts for 18.36 minutes. Program 4: &quot;The abandoned children&quot;. The presenter of this program is a woman. her guests are three male speakers. The first represents the local health services; the second is an agent of the local regional office for social affairs while the last one is the director of the regional office for social affairs of Program 2. The recording takes about 18.28 minutes. 3 . t h e l I n G u I s t I c Va r I a B l e s The variables considered are the phonemes /q/ and /g/, which are a clear manifestation of divergence/convergence processes (cf. coupland 1981, 1984,

and 1988a &amp; b; Giles and coupland 1991) and of social and stylistic variation in a diglossic speech community (cf. abdel-Jawad 1981: 238; haeri 1991: 130). The participants either converge or diverge towards each others' speeches, particularly at the stylistic level. They converge/diverge for such reasons as identity, or identification with a group of speakers. They also converge/diverge for personal issues such as to show one's own social status and /or level of education or because of gender roles in the speech community. The formality of the situation compels both presenters and participants to use the standard form of arabic, i.e. /q/. however, the nature of the topics and the diversity of the audience are also causes which may oblige both presenters and participants to switch to informal styles. They make use of the velar /g/ instead of the uvular /q/ to lower their styles from formal to less formal ones. 4 . t h e r e su lt s

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To verify the assumption that &quot;in mixed-sex dyad, it appears that both genders adopted a linguistic style more like that of their out-group partner than they would have maintained with an in-group partner&quot; (mulac et al. 1988: 331), we split the participants into dyads and compare their scores. The results obtained tell us that if the presenters and the participants feel similar in the dyad, they converge; if they feel dissimilar, they diverge. The highest probability of convergence depends on such factors as the search for interlocutor's approval; need to gain familiarity or intimacy with a high social status addressee, or because of some interpersonal motives. The General secretary (a woman) and the director of the office for social affairs (a man) are recorded twice, i.e. on two different occasions and in two different programs. The man is recorded in Program2 (P2) and Program4 (P4), while the woman is recorded in P2 and P3. Their results are compared so as to see whether gender and status of speaker have any influence on the outcome (Gallois and Giles 1998) . we also look at any variation on the part of both speakers due to topic, or to addressee, or to sociolinguistic factors such as `status', `power', or `solidarity'. (cf. brown and Gilman 1972; fairclough 1989). The following figure summarises the results obtained from the radio programs:

figure 1: overall scores of /q/ and /g/ by participants, dyads, and programs 4 .1. T h e r a dio Pr e se N T e r s ' s c or e s concerning the use of both velar and uvular stops by male and female presenters, the results obtained from the four radio sessions show that: 1. The female presenters have the highest score of (q) = [g]. 2. The female presenter of P1 scores higher than her colleague of P4, who does not have any score. 3. during both programs, the male presenters do not use any velar stops. They make use of the standard variable /q/ all throughout the meetings. Next figure and graph summarise the results of each presenter:

figure 2: Numbers and percentages of use of /q/ and /g/ by male and female radio presenters

37

scores by sex of presenter 10 00

Graph 1: (q)=[g] scores, by sex of animators These results are cross-checked with those of the director of regional office for social affairs and the General secretary of a charity association of adrar. 4 . 2 . T h e Ge N e r a l se c r eTa ry ' s s c or e s The next figure reports the General secretary's individual scores of /q/ and /g/ during the two programs. They are compared to those of the dyad and to that of the whole program.

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Programs P2 P3

individual score 11.36 20

dyadic score 8.62 00 30 27

Program score 10 17.75

00 20

figure 3: General secretary's (q) = [g] scores by programs and dyads

The overall observation is that: 1. when the dyad's scores are low, those of the General secretary are also low. when the dyads' scores are high, as in both dyads of P3, those of the secretary are high. 2. The sessions' scores are not significant. 3. out of these results, we conclude that the female participant, whose status is important in the community, makes use of local feature /g/. This may be due to her &quot;solidarity&quot; with the audience, or because of &quot;deference&quot; to her listeners (ferguson 1994: 12). in general, she uses a significant number of words containing velar stop /g/, since her topic compels her to speak in a style which is understood by any listeners, whatever their level of education. 4 . 3. T h e di r e c Tor' s s c or e s The next figure reports the director's individual scores. They are compared to those of the dyads and the sessions.

j e z i k u

Programs P2 P4

individual score 50 6.45

dyadic score 42 5

Program score 10 2.96

figure 4: director's (q) = [g] scores by programs and dyads 1. The director's scores are high when those of the dyads are high, as in P2. They are low when those of the dyad are low, as in P4. 2. he uses more colloquial items than his female counterpart in P2. (cf. figure 3) 3. The director seems to have an unbalanced score of (q) = [g]. in one session, he scores high; in the other he scores low. in one situation, he respects the formality of the program; in the other he tends towards a low informal style of speech. The graph reports the director's scores.

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Graph 2: The director's scores according to sessions and dyads 4 .4 . c om Pa r i NG T h e di r e c Tor a N d se c r eTa ry ' s s c or e s in the following figure, we compare the number of velar and uvular stops used by both the director and the General secretary during various sessions. we also report the general (q) = [g] scores of each participant so as to have a clear idea about the relationship between sex/gender of speaker and use of linguistic forms. Participants/programs director P2 P4 Total General secretary P2 P3 Total N° of /q/ 03 58 61 48 00 12 32 92 N° of /g/ 03 4 7 5 00 3 8 16 scores 50 6.45 10 11.36 00 20 20 14 figure 5: The director and the General secretary's numbers and scores of /q/ and /g/ from the figure, we deduce several points: 1. The director and the General secretary's overall scores are not significant. 2. The General secretary scores higher than the director. 3. The numbers and scores of use of velar /g/ give an explicit picture about the discrepancy that exists between sex/gender of the speakers as concerns their use of the local variant. 4. whatever the variant is, the female speaker does always have a higher number of use than the male. The following graph illustrates and compares the results:

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40

Graph 3: (q) = [g] scores of the director and the General secretary Throughout the graph, the tendencies become obvious. The General secretary does not respect the formality of the radio programs. as an `initiative', she uses more colloquial words than her male counterpart, the director. The General secretary's results verify two hypotheses. The first is that adrar's educated women are &quot;innovative&quot; (haeri 1997a, 1997b, and 2000), i.e. they persist in using colloquial forms in formal settings. The second is that women are more &quot;conservative&quot; than men, since they keep on using &quot;standard&quot; or &quot;old variants&quot;. This sociolinguistic phenomenon is clearly illustrated on graph 3 which concerns the use of informal velar /g/ and the standard form /q/ in a formal setting and situation. The results do also verify those obtained from the speeches of male/female presenters. They confirm that the males, whether radio presenters or participants, do not have any propensity towards the use of the local informal variant. They rather make use of standard /q/ in this context, which proves that they perceive the `prestige' (cf. ibrahim 1986; abu-haidar 1989) which is linked to the use of `standard' /q/. These outcomes confirm also that women have an inclination towards the use of local variant /g/. This may be due to their deference to the audience, or due to their distance with their interlocutors, or because of their sense of solidarity with the listeners. it may also be caused by their involvement and their emotive reactions to the topics. conclusIon

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The results obtained show that `western' sociolinguistic models of language variation and change are not verified in arabic speaking communities. at the reverse of labov's hypothesis, arab educated males use standard forms more than their female counterparts particularly in formal settings and situations. haeri's hypothesis whereby educated women are `innovative' in their use of linguistic forms is well attested in adrar speech community. however, the innovation is not through the use of standard forms such as uvular /q/; it is done

with colloquial and vernacular linguistic features, such as velar /g/, which is used within a formal situation of speech: the radio. on the other hand, we do also verify the conclusions of bell (1984, 1986, 1992, 2001) that prove that, with respect to the topics and styles of speech, radio news-readers as well as presenters and animators do not always converge towards their respective audiences. however, and with respect to al-Khatib's (1995, 2001) conclusions, we also find that some adrar radio program animators, the females in particular, converge towards their audiences through the use of colloquial linguistic forms, while the males do not. references abdel-Jawad, h.r. 1981. lexical and phonological Variation in Spoken arabic in amman. university of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Phd dissertation. abu-haidar, f. 1989. are iraqi women more prestige conscious than men? sex differentiation in baghdadi arabic. language in Society 18 (3), 471-481. al-Khatib, m.a. 1995. The impact of interlocutor sex on linguistic accommodation: a case study of Jordan radio phone-in program. Multilingua 14 (2), 133-150. al-Khatib, m.a. 2001. audience design revisited in a diglossic speech community: a case study of three different Tv programs addressed to three different audiences. Multilingua 20 (4), 393-414. bell, a. 1982a, radio: The style of news language. Journal of Communication 32, 150-164. bell, a. 1982b. This isn't the bbc: colonialism in New Zealand english. applied linguistics 3, 246-258. bell, a. 1984. language style as audience design. language in Society 13, 145294. bell, a. 1983. broadcast news as a language standard. International Journal of the Sociology of language 40, 29-34 bell, a. 1986. responding to your audience: Taking the initiative. Paper presented to the Minnesota Conference on linguistic accommodation and Style-shifting, minneapolis, minnesota. bell, a. 1991.The language of the news Media. oxford: blackwell. bell, a. 1992. hit and miss: referee design in the dialects of New Zealand television advertisements. language and Communication 12 (3/4), 327340. bell, a. 2001. back in style: reworking audience design. in P. eckert and J.r. rickford (eds.) Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. cambridge: cambridge university Press. coupland, N. 1981. The social differentiation of functional language use: a sociolinguistic investigation of travel agency talk. university of wales, cardiff. Phd dissertation. coupland, N., and h. Giles. 1988b. introduction: The communicative contexts of accommodation. language and Communication 8, 175-182.

Su M M a rY D O T E X T B O OK S H AV E A GE N DE R? GE N DE R A NA LYSIS OF PR I M A RY S C HO OL T E X T B O OK S This paper demonstrates the approach to the study of primary school textbooks gender analysis and its results. The results explicitly tell us how women have been marginalized as text and image authors in the analyzed textbooks. Female characters in textbooks are also less looked at and compared to male

characters, although both have been interpreted in traditional and stereotypical manner (family and professional roles, values and interests...) as a part of text worlds. Stereotypes are partially obliterated only when presenting characters' outlook. Aiming to ensure the notions of textbooks as a part of the important role in promoting policy of gender equality and correspond to the concept of a contemporary textbook, crucial findings suggest that educational policy creators are to be concerned about the textbook accreditation standards and gender equality obtainment, as well as about setting up conditions for introducing the gender aspect in the educational system. KLJUCNE RECI: obrazovanje, rod, rodne uloge, citanke, sterotipi.

Since the writings of the social and clinical psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner (Bronfenbrenner 1979), researchers in education have come to consider the importance of environment in determining the success or failure of learning. His work emphasised the effects of the environmental systems of the individual, i.e. his ecology, on his development. In education, the learner's readiness to learn languages and be open to discover their cultures is also quite related to his ecology inasmuch as the latter develops in him positive or negative attitudes towards these languages and cultures, attitudes which influence greatly his involvement in the learning process. The concept of attitude, which is generally defined as &quot;an acquired, latent, psychological predisposition to react in a certain manner towards an object&quot; (Lüdi and Py 1986: 97), is central to understanding the situation of foreign language learning in Arab countries in the sense that it explains the learning behaviour of the foreign language student, especially in his relationship to the culture or cultures he is exposed to in the classroom. In foreign language and culture learning at university level, attitudes towards the target language and culture play a major role in the student's readiness and subsequent achievement of the objectives of the curriculum of the degree he intends to obtain. Emphasis is put here on university level as the objectives of a university education go beyond the mere fact of accumulating knowledge in a specific field for a future job after graduation. University education is part and parcel of the great social enterprise of producing citizens capable of taking in charge the country's management, including its relationships with the rest of the world. As such, success and failure of a university education is to be assessed not only in terms of how much knowledge the graduate has or has not accumulated, but also how much savoir-être he has been able or not to integrate to live up to the hopes and expectations his society has invested in him. Attitude is all the more important inasmuch as it is associated with deeprooted emotional responses, as a psychological process very much relevant to the

OPPOSITIONAL MOTIVATION:

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cognitive process of learning, in which contacts with the foreign language and culture are based on feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about the people who speak that language or hold that culture. A conflicting or amicable relation to a people influences a student's interest in their language and culture, i.e. his attitude to approach them.1 It has been observed that considerable numbers of foreign language students in Arab universities do show negative attitudes towards the cultures of the native peoples of this language. These attitudes seem often surprising to teachers and somehow not taken into account by syllabus designers and language teaching methods. This is partly due to the fact that these attitudes have coped quite well with the learning of the language, instead of being a definite deterrent or a psychological inhibitor, though they are sometimes so. Foreign language learning often takes place in a non-supportive, and at times even hostile, environment of resentment, suspicion and rejection of the culture of the target language. This hostile ecology brings many Arab foreign language students to miss a great part of the objectives of the foreign language curriculum as they view the foreign culture as a substractive (Gardner 1979) threat that could take the place of their own culture, while the foreign culture is meant to be additive to their own, i.e. approached in a positive give-and-take relationship that can be profitable to them in terms of widening their scope, vista and comprehension of the world. It is in this sense that attitudes towards foreign languages and cultures among Arab students stand as prerequisites to the real effectuation of the university curricular objectives. This is all the more true as these attitudes determine the student's motivation to engage body and soul into achieving these objectives. Defined as &quot;a state of cognitive and emotional arousal, which leads to a conscious decision to act&quot; (Williams and Burden 2001: 120), motivation, as a crucial affective variable in the learning process, which comprises psychological factors that &quot;energize behaviour and give it direction&quot; (Hilgard, Atkinson and Atkinson 1979: 281), determines the student's interest in the subject studied and the amount of time and effort he is ready and willing to invest in it. Yet, because there is a clear distinction between language and culture as far as attitude is concerned in the sense that a negative attitude towards a culture does not necessarily induce a negative attitude towards the language that conveys it, motivation to learn the language may vary from the motivation to really know the people who speak it, i.e. the motivation to discover in an unbiased manner their culture or cultures. Although attitude towards the language may well coincide with attitude towards the culture, in which case it would induce or not the motivation to learn both, attitudes towards language and culture may well not operate on the same wavelength, and produce a situation whereby the student develops a motivation to learn the language, and at the same time remains completely impermeable to and turns away from its culture. Contrary to Schumann's (1986) theory of the `acculturation model', which states that rejection of a group's culture is likely to lead to inhibiting the learning of the group's language, many students in Arab universities manage to be quite good users of, for instance, English in spite of their negative attitudes towards the English or the Americans. This is mainly due to the type of motivation they activate in

their approach to this language. Probably, a positive attitude towards the culture is likely to correlate with higher achievement in the language, a situation in which it is the integrative motivation that directs the learning process. Integrative motivation is then one of the main positive results of the personality variable referred to as empathy. Since the works of Gardner (1985) and until recently, integrative motivation held a privileged position in foreign language learning as it stood as the best booster for the language learning process. Yet, Gardner himself, and many researchers before him, such as Lukmani (1972) or Ellis (1994), have come to mitigate this statement and reconsider this theory, more applicable to second language learning, and admit that other types of motivation could induce successful learning, especially in the case of foreign languages. In the case of Arab university students, other types of motivation play an important role to overcome the culture inhibition and achieve successful learning of the foreign language. Despite the fact that the other, not less important, objectives of university education are not achieved, these types of motivation bring the students to spend the necessary time and effort to attain a decent, if not a good, mastery of the language. These types can be grouped under the general name of instrumental motivation, in which practical factors, external to the individual, come to induce the desire to learn. Among these factors, Williams and Burden (2001: 116) mention &quot;passing exams, financial rewards, furthering a career or gaining a promotion&quot;. This type of motivation was labelled by Atkinson (1964) as achievement motivation in the sense that the student's desire to learn is induced and sustained by his need to achieve a success in a given subject. Achievement motivation is then necessary for students who struggle against the fear of failure.2 Williams and Burden (2001) prefer to define motivation in terms of a combination of either internal or external influences. Internal influences range from a mere interest in an activity to a wish to succeed. External influences refer to the impact of other people in determining the desire to learn. Deci and Ryan (1985) express the same idea using the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. With intrinsic motivation, according to the authors, the reward is the learning experience itself, instead of an external reward like success. In the case of some Arab students that learn a foreign language despite their negative attitudes towards its culture, it is a quite special and different type of motivation that prompts learning. It is a motivation that combines internal and external factors. This combination operates in a specific way in the sense that internal factors are the result of the external ones, and gives birth to a new type of motivation which I will be referring to as oppositional motivation. It is a psychological state of defiance and challenge, in which the student learns the language of a people whose culture he despises and considers as the antithesis of his own. It is a motivation of confrontation in which language becomes an arm that can lead to defeating the Other. Otherness is viewed, in the eyes of such students, not as an opportunity for enrichment, but rather as adversity, enmity and conflict. On the basis of a social view of motivation, as opposed to the cognitive perspective which affirms the individual choice in making decisions, it is suggested here that the learning of foreign languages among some Arab university students

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is sometimes successful despite negative attitudes towards their cultures, because it is underlain by an oppositional motivation. This motivation is based on the internal factor of self-satisfaction induced by the external factor of their religiousdominated culture that makes up the social context of their upbringing and education. Students are motivated to learn the language by their response to a religious prescription, an Islamic one, which establishes foreign language learning as a moral duty. Their learning is viewed by them as an act of piety as they put into practice the words which the prophet of Islam, Mohammed, is supposed to have said: &quot;He who learns a people's language is safe from their harm&quot;. Their oppositional motivation includes an instrumental one as they learn the language as an act of self-defence. It also comprises an extrinsic one as they are influenced by their religious-cultural environment. It integrates an intrinsic motivation as well in the sense that it relies on a belief and a moral conformity to this belief. It is not meant here that all students are motivated in this way, nor is it assumed that oppositional motivation is the only motivation that brings a category of Arab students to learn foreign languages. Oppositional motivation is rather what allows these students to overcome the cultural obstacle and engage in the language learning process despite their negative attitudes towards the foreign culture. It appears here that the student's views of the foreign language and the foreign culture play a substantial role in determining his attitudes towards both of them and his motivation to approach them. These views are nothing but his representation of the Other and the relationship he is supposed to have with him, i.e. his conception of otherness. The notion of otherness, or the relation to the Other, underlies attitude, and consequently the whole intercultural process experience, whether within or outside class. The view of the Other is thus a representation on the basis of which opinions are formed and attitudes are adopted. The main concern here is social representations, i.e. the group's imagination of one's position in the world and its relationships with the other groups which are believed to possess different cultures. As opposed to individual representations, which are the individual's imagination of his own position as a member of his community or society and personal perceptions and projections, social representations are collective conceptions that are shared by a cultural group. They are social as they involve social rapports, and they are collective in the sense that they become the group's mode of knowing the world, i.e. &quot;processes of mediation between concept and perception&quot; (Moscovici 1976: 302) that result from the very interrelations and contacts between members of the same group and across different groups. They are approximations (Moore 2001: 10) that compartmentalise reality according to the pertinence of a particular element. For instance, some Algerians' representation of a particular group, such as the Americans, may have a negative representation, while another one, such as the Swedish, may have a positive one, despite the fact they are generally viewed as belonging to the same general category referred to as the `West'. In this sense, representations retain only elements that may justify prejudiced or favourable behaviour. As a &quot;form of practical knowledge&quot; (Nuchèze and Colletta 2002: 172), they are inescapably part of the individual's database that helps him decide on the most appropriate and suitable actions in

various situations. They are, to use Maisonneuve's words, &quot;spaces of opinions&quot; (quoted in Nuchèze and Colletta 2002: 16) which determine not only general behaviour, but also learning behaviour.3 In certain instances, representations acquire a greater importance as far as opinion and behaviour are concerned as they are the only sources of knowledge, as is the case with some students' views of the `West'. In this situation, negative attitudes can only be explained by the kind of representations they hold, representations which become the central &quot;mental schemata&quot; (Zarate 2004: 29), not only in the relation to the Other, but also in defining one's identity, be it individual or ethnic. Moreover, representations, not only across communities but also within the same community, are not peacefully juxtaposed. They are often in competition, depending on the types of discourse they emerge from and the people who produce this discourse. Ideology, and most particularly Islamist ideology in Arab countries, does a lot in producing a particular type of discourse which fashions and sustains some representations of the Other (the `West') in a logic of conflict and opposition to other types of discourses and representations that are available in Arab societies. Those who are likely to hold power and exercise domination, socially and politically, are those who are capable of imposing, by force or consent, their discourse and their representations. As Zarate (2004: 31) put it: &quot;Representations do not coexist in a mere relation of juxtaposition, but in a competing space where the stakes are those of a symbolic struggle for a social, and sometimes political, recognition&quot;. In education, social representations affect the individual learning behaviour. Here, they intervene in this pedagogical context and play a substantial role in directing learners' attitudes towards the subjects studied. In language learning, two types of representations interfere: language representations and social representations. There is a clear-cut distinction between these two types as one can be negative while the second is positive. The representation of the English language is positive among many Arab students, while some of the cultures underlying this language, such as American culture, may have a negative representation among the same students. Distinction between language representations and social representations is probably not natural, since &quot;there is no language,&quot; as expressed by Poirier (1989: 83), &quot;without a message, there is no message without the intention to signify, and there is no signification without a reference system&quot;.4 This distinction is often the result of a deliberate action, much like a nuclear fission, undertaken by ideologies that purpose to split language from culture. This split, in most Arab-Islamic countries, is operated by some currents of thought for the sake of preserving younger generations from any supposedly `negative' influence that foreign cultures may induce. What is peculiar about social representations, as compared to language representations, as far as foreign language learning is concerned, is the fact that when they are negative about a particular culture, they do not hinder language learning, since language learning is sustained by positive language representations and boosted by oppositional motivation. In the case of Arab students, the negative representations of American culture, though they induce negative attitudes towards this culture and thus prevent them from fully experiencing it and taking advantage of its benefits, yet, they do not deter English language learning.

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Teaching culture, and more specifically foreign culture, is also taking into consideration the social and cultural representations found in the foreign culture, as they underlie what J. L. Martinand called social practices of reference (see Raisky and Caillot 1996: 22-23) that direct, not only social choices, but also didactic ones. These practices, based on the economic and social situation of society, are what society has fixed as the representative and most appropriate forms of behaviour that all its members ought to adopt. In a cross-cultural situation, it is the confrontation between the social practices of reference of the social and cultural representations of the native culture and the target one that is the dynamics of the cross-cultural experience. It is the balance in this confrontation that determines the success or failure of this experience. Beyond the indisputable utility of representations in any culture, they still stand as psychological inhibitions outside and inside the classroom by inducing students to cope with one of the most common principle among human beings, the principle of `the least effort'. It is easier and far more comfortable to face the familiar than confront the unfamiliar, to find ready-made answers than strive for explanations, to be certain than doubt. What political and religious ideologies in Arab countries have laid, as far as students of foreign languages and cultures are concerned, is a substratum of stereotyped and representation-based pictures of the Other that jeopardises their very objective of engaging in a university education, by inducing in them negative attitudes that impede the realisation of this objective, i.e. their quest to find their way out of the ethnocentric cocoon. Succeeding in learning the foreign language through oppositional motivation bears witness to the existence of a dramatic situation whereby there is little opportunity offered to many Arab students to learn through passion rather than hatred.

1 Works on the strong relationship between attitude and learning were produced as early as the 1950's with Adorno through his Authoritarian Personality (Adorno 1950), which explored the relations between prejudice, personality and learning. Other consistent works also continued this type of investigation with people like Anglejan and Tucker (1973), or later Gardner and Lambert (1972), Gardner (1979), Gardner and Smythe (1981). 2 With the works of the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb, distinction between instrumental and integrative motivations seems unsatisfactory. Hebb (1966) spoke of optimal arousal, a motivation which induces learning without having to meet other needs than novelty, curiosity and pleasure. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) uses the concept of flow to describe this psychological state in which learning becomes an optimal experience of effortless movement of energy. 3 W. Doise (Doise 1979: 184), working on the linguistic behaviours of categories of the Swiss population speaking different regional dialects, has observed that the nature of the relationships between these groups, whether in a situation of competition or cooperation, affects to a great extent, not only their readiness to learn each other's language, but also each group's tendency to accentuate its regional accent so as to distinguish themselves from the others. 4 J.-C. Abric defines social representations as a system of interpretation of reality: &quot;Social representations,&quot; he writes, &quot;are the product and process of a mental activity by which an individual reconstitutes and attributes a specific signification to the reality he faces&quot; (quoted in Nuchèze and Colletta 2002: 171). These representations, according to Moscovici (1976: 39), are expressed and observed through &quot;a speech, a gesture, an encounter, in a daily environment&quot;

O P P O S I T I O N A L M O T I VA T I O N : I N S I G H T S I N T O A N E W P S YC HOL O G IC A L PR E DI S P O S I T IO N I N FAC I N G THE OTHER IN ARAB SOCIETIES Foreign language and culture teaching and learning in Arab countries has acquired, as a pedagogical process, specificities which makes it today one of the main urgent concerns of research in educational sciences in this part of the world. Within a social context which is extremely permeated with cultural and ideological influences, many students tend to import social representations of the Other into the classroom, something which determines their readiness and learning strategies in their approach to foreign languages and cultures. This has induced among many Arab students of foreign languages and cultures a new type of motivation referred to in this paper as oppositional motivation. Oppositional motivation allows these students to distinguish between the foreign culture, towards which they have developed negative attitudes and representations, and its language they are psychologically disposed to learn, and thus overcome a psychological inhibition which would otherwise prevent them from learning the target language. KEYWORDS: attitude, motivation, oppositional motivation, Other, otherness, representation, ecology, foreign language, foreign culture.

Su M M a rY T E X T UA L I N T E R AC T ION: P O S SI BL E I M PL IC AT IONS FOR FOR E IGN L A NGUAGE T E AC H I NG This paper explores some aspects of textual interaction within written discourse analysis as well as possible implications of such an approach for foreign language teaching. The focus is on writer-reader interaction. The writer guides the reader by signalling through the text, whereas the reader approaches the text actively by using the writer's signals and intertextuality which can help create expectations on further text development. All this can have a positive influence on teaching reading and writing skills and some classroom activities are suggested at the end of the paper. KLJUCNE RECI: tekst, interakcija, citanje, intertekstualnost, nastavne aktivnosti.

udc 875(091)-21

Danijela Ljubojevi OS ,,Kosta Abrasevi&quot; Beograd

i N T h e pl ays of aeschylus, sophocles aNd eur ipides

Greek mythology has exercised a deep and unparalleled influence upon Western culture. dramatists, artists and philosophers from roman times have been inspired by the thrilling legacy of ancient Greece. The origins of these myths are impossible to determine and there is no one true version of any myth. however, owing to the great tragedies of aeschylus, sophocles and euripides, whose plays drew almost exclusively upon the Greek myths, it is possible to have a profound insight into the content of the myths. furthermore, it is much easier to comprehend the account when the same myth is retold by each of the three dramatists. on the other hand, each of the playwrights had to add different elements to approach the story in an original manner. one of the retold myths is the account of orestes' vengeance, where aeschylus in Orestia, sophocles in Electra and euripides in his Electra adopted different approach and point of view to revenge1. among different characters which can be compared, orestes' sister, electra, deserves close and meticulous attention and the aim of this paper is to show both how the three playwrights saw the traditional myth and what their approach to the tradition was through electra's attitude towards matricide. it was aeschylus in 458 Bc who first dramatized the legend of electra in the second part of his Orestia trilogy called Choephori (The Libation Bearers). although his electra plays only a subordinate role in the whole story of revenging the murdered father (she appears in the act one, but completely disappears from the scene at line 584), aeschylus created electra as necessary and useful character for the preparation of the vengeance (dukat 1996: 36). electra appears at the very beginning of the play, silent, dressed in black, bearing libations to the grave. The libations are from clytemnestra, electra's mother, who, after a horrible nightmare of a snake biting her, has sent the offerings to the grave of her dead husband. Though electra goes to the grave of her father to pour the libations, she believes it is not righteous to do so, as they are sent by the murderous wife. she asks the chorus for help, to &quot;guide and instruct&quot; her, and after a short dialogue, electra changes her prayer and starts demanding murder for murder and revenge for her father. however, it is important to note that electra shows her human character precisely

The characTer of elecTra

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elecTra leader elecTra leader elecTra leader

with her hesitation and asking questions, she does not simply pray for someone to kill in return (Goldhill 1986: 23). she asks whether it is pious to pray for revenge, but the chorus provides a simple and direct justification of it which she accepts. pray on them what? expound, instruct my doubt. This: upon them some god or mortal come as judge or as avenger? speak thy thought. pray in set terms, Who shall the slayer slay. Beseemeth it to ask such boon of heaven? how not, to wreak a wrong upon a foe? (aeschylus 1991-93: 12)2

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The next important scene is the recognition scene between orestes and electra, where electra recognises orestes by the lock of his hair and his footsteps. although rather unconvincing, this scene is necessary for the plot that continues with the siblings' lament over their father's fate with the refrain that blood must pay for blood. Both the chorus and electra recount the aftermath of agamemnon's murder, driving orestes to deliver his strongest cry for vengeance. This is the most important role that electra has in this play: she openly calls for matricide and urges her brother to commit such a terrible act. aweless in hate, o mother, sternly brave! as in a foeman's grave Thou laid'st in earth a king, but to the bier No citizen drew near, Thy husband, thine, yet for his obsequies, Thou bad'st no wail arise! (aeschylus 1991-93: 34) it is almost unbelievable that a woman would forget the murder of her child, and that is what electra completely puts aside. she forgives her father the sacrifice of her sister iphigenia; still she craves for blood of her mother. she condemns clytemnestra for killing her king and her husband, as if this were the closest family tie one can have. By openly renouncing her mother and supporting her brother, electra defends the new patriarchal order that is to come. i would agree with erich fromm who in Symbolic Language in Myth, Fairy Tale, Ritual and the Novel gives the illustration of Bachofen's analysis of Orestia and says that it is ... a symbolic representation of a last fight between maternal goddesses and the victorious paternal gods...Matriarchal culture is characterised by an emphasis on blood ties, ties to the soil, and a passive acceptance of all natural phenomena. patriarchal society, in contrast, is characterised by respect for man-made law, by predominance of rational thought, and by man's effort to change natural phenomena. (petrovi 2004: 245) in the XX century, an american playwright eugene o'Neil also retold the myth in his play Mourning becomes Electra where he emphasises that the myth

could not be read only individually but also culturally, through the whole cultural context in which it was created, and it is the story of the two principles where only patriarchal principle of the father and logos triumphs (Miti 2004: 70). sophocles's version of the electra story was written around 410 Bce, and it is difficult to read it without thinking of euripides's Electra and aeschylus' Choephori. When aeschylus told the story, he did so with an eye to the ethical issues associated with a blood feud. sophocles, however, addresses the problem of character -- namely, he questions what kind of woman would want so keenly to kill her mother. The play opens with electra where she can be seen chanting and lamenting over her father's death and waiting for her brother-avenger. she is contrasted to her sister chrysothemis in a dialogue which is very similar to the dialogue between antigone and ismene. chrysothemis mourns for her father and brother as well, but she stoops before the ones who have the power (dukat 1996: 40); on the other hand, electra does not want to accept the present condition and sophocles depicts &quot;the passionate intensity of electra's hatred&quot; (Goldhill 1986: 269). her hope is completely destroyed when she learns from the false messenger about orestes' death and says: &quot;oh, miserable that i am! i am lost this day! [...] i am lost, hapless one, i am undone!&quot; (sophocles 1991: 35)3 however, her hatred is so intense and she is so determined to avenge her father that she even thinks about murdering aegisthus alone: Behold these two sisters, my friends, who saved their father's house; who, when their foes were firmly planted of yore, took their lives in their hands and stood forth as avengers of blood! [...] i must do this deed with mine own hand, and alone; for assuredly i will not leave it void. in the dialogue between electra and clytemnestra, electra accuses her mother of killing agamemnon in cold blood and reveals the true reason why clytemnestra committed such a crime. although clytemnestra tries to explain her action by saying: Thy father ­ this is thy constant pretext ­ was slain by me. yes, by me ­ i know it well; it admits of no denial; for justice slew him, and not i alone, ­ justice, whom it became thee to support, hadst thou been right-minded; seeing that this father of thine, whom thou art ever lamenting, was the one man of the Greeks who had the heart to sacrifice thy sister to the gods ­ he, the father, who had not shared the mother's pangs. (sophocles 1991: 27)

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electra explicitly and unemotionally states it is not true, and the real motive is adultery of her mother with aegisthus: &quot;But i must tell thee that thy deed was not just; no, thou wert drawn on to it by the wooing of the base man who is now thy spouse.&quot; (sophocles 1991: 29) What is more, clytemnestra does not behave as a mother to electra and orestes and has done wrong to them: &quot;for tell me, if thou wilt, wherefore thou art now doing the most shameless deeds of all, ­ dwelling as wife with that blood-

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guilty one, who first helped thee to slay my sire, and bearing children to him, while thou hast cast out the earlier-born, the stainless offspring of a stainless marriage.&quot; (sophocles 1991: 30) it can be concluded from this short episode that sophocles wanted to present electra as a heroic character who has suffered a lot because of a guilty motheradulteress. although matricide is a terrible crime, the sympathies of the reader are somehow with electra whom sophocles puts on the stage as great and heroic. The climax of this version is when electra recognises orestes. her ultimate despair transforms into unbelievable happiness, and they plot the murder of their mother first, and then of aegisthus. While in aeschylus electra disappears from the stage when the murder takes place, in sophocles' story electra not only does conspire against her mother but also takes part by urging orestes to hit their mother once again while she is on guard in front of the house: &quot;smite, if thou canst, once more!&quot; (sophocles 1991: 81) Kovacevi in his study on Greek tragedy believes that the real murderer here is electra (1932: 43). however, dukat says the difference between aeschylus and sophocles is in treating the moral problem: is it allowed for a son to kill his own mother in order to avenge his father? aeschylus' solution was to introduce furies in the end that drive orestes into madness (although he was acquitted of the matricide), while sophocles' play ends with chorus that is appalled but says the murderers have to be punished: &quot;The curses are at work; the buried live; blood flows for blood, drained from the slayers by those who died of yore.&quot; (sophocles 1991: 81)and concludes in a kind of reconciliation: &quot;o house of atreus, through how many sufferings hast thou come forth at last in freedom, crowned with good by this day's enterprise!&quot; (sophocles 1991: 89) euripides similarly focuses on the issue of character, but euripides's electra is ultimately psychically destroyed by her situation. euripides makes clytemnestra's murder appear a horrible act, since electra cunningly leads her mother to death. in the beginning of the play, there is a different setting than in aeschylus and sophocles: the scene is set before the hut of the peasant to whom electra is married. This extraordinary change of dramatic scenario is explained in the peasant's prologue4. he informs the audience of the present situation (how he got electra as a wife) and also tells about the incident when aegisthus wanted to kill electra but her mother saved her life: &quot;But when e'en thus there seemed some room for fear that she might bear some noble lord a child by stealth and aegisthus was minded to slay her, her mother, though she had a cruel heart, yet rescued the maiden from his hand.&quot; (euripides 1991: 5)5 The benevolent peasant also understands bitterness of his wife, though she is not loyal to him in return. electra craves for her brother, thinking only how to revenge her father. her brother orestes, who lives in exile, appears with his friend pylades, but electra does not recognise him. in this scene, euripides shows his particular sense for psychological analysis, especially when orestes, doubting his further actions, asks electra, before she has recognised him, what she expects from her brother to do if he shows up. &quot;What could orestes do in this matter, if he did return? [...] But suppose he comes, how could he slay his father's murderers? [...] Wouldst thou be brave enough to help him slay his mother?&quot; (euripides 1991: 19) electra replies that she would want revenge, and would help her brother &quot;with the self-same axe that drank my father's blood&quot; (euripides 1991: 19). she adds that she would just like to shed her mother's

blood, and then she would not mind to die: &quot;once i have shed my mother's blood o'er his, then welcome death!&quot; (euripides 1991: 19) The climax of electra's cruelty can be seen in her strong determination to see her mother dead. even when orestes has second thoughts, electra is resolute:

&quot;oresTes What must we do to our mother? slay her? elecTra What! has pity seized thee at sight of her? oresTes God! how can i slay her that bare and suckled me? elecTra slay her as she slew thy father and mine.&quot; (euripides 1991: 58) in euripides' version of the story, after having deceived her mother to enter the hut, electra follows her and directly takes part in the murder. The order of murders is the same as in aeschylus' version: orestes kills aegisthus first (hitting him from the back), then his mother, while sophocles changed it. With this order of events, euripides puts the clytemnestra's murder to be the final and terrible act. The solution to his play is not natural for the reason that euripides uses deus ex machina technique and the discouri appear on the stage (&quot;from above&quot;). They explain that clytemnestra and aegisthus deserved death; nevertheless, the act of their murder is morally unacceptable. The discouri order electra to marry pylades, while orestes has to defend himself before the aeropag, the supreme court at athens, and will be finally absolved of his crime. allowing ethic re-questioning in the interpretation of electra and orestes' revenge, euripides is closer to the most traditional aeschylus' version of the same motive, but at the same time he questions the validity of the delphi prophecy, which incited the tragedy in the first place, when it nominated orestes to be the avenger. Though religious, euripides in Electra condemns apollo who orders the murder and establishes moral laws for others, while he himself demands bloody revenge (djuri 1998: 342). To conclude, by dealing with the same motive of revenging father by killing mother, the three dramatists took different approach through the use of the female character of electra. The execution of mother in aeschylus is both necessity and crime, which reaches its end on much higher level (leski 1995: 226). his electra is emotional, hesitant and restrained. in sophocles play, apollo's demand is valid as something sacred, while his electra is a tortured heroic character who does not accept limitations; on the other hand, her greatness is precisely what makes readers feel uncomfortable. euripides tries to show that the committed murder falls out from the religious concept and criticises the traditional myth. for him electra is an antiheroic and pathological character. By criticising and rejecting the traditional myth, euripides made the tragedy lose both its content and the gist; thus, it was not possible anymore to write tragedies after euripides, and the playwrights turned to lyrics and comedies which drew upon new sources and found inspiration in everyday life (dukat 1996: 47).

1 robert Graves in The Greek Myths (ch. 113) gives different versions of the myth, providing the content for his approach from these three tragedies, which altogether build up a complete picture of what happened in agamemnon's tragic family. 2 aeschylus, The choephori, electronically enhanced text.

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3 sophocles, electra, electronically enhanced text. 4 This change of setting is typical of euripides' plays who introduces for the first time in the Greek theatre real and common people. aristotle in chapter 25 of Poetics says that &quot;sophocles said that he drew men as they ought to be; euripides, as they are. &quot; 5 euripides, Electra, electronically enhanced text.

SU M M A RY T h e c h a r ac T e r of e l e c T r a i N T h e pl ays of a e s c h y lus , s opho c l e s a N d eu r i pi de s Greek myths have always been a rich source of inspiration for many playwrights and one of the most famous myths is agamemnon's murder and vengeance on the mother who committed it. among many characters that appear in the myth, electra deserves meticulous attention and inspired even the ancient Greek dramatists aeschylus, sophocles and euripides, who approached the story in three different ways. aeschylus regarded the matricide as a necessity and electra in his play is both emotional and indecisive. sophocles saw electra as a tortured heroine who does not have limits. euripides, the last of these playwrights to deal with the myth, provides a lot of criticism for the traditional myth and in his play electra is not only anti-heroine but also pathological character. after euripides, the importance of tragedy fades away in the ancient Greece and the plays were not written anymore in the manner of the greatest playwrights. KEYWORDS: myth, play, murder, revenge, matricide, tragedy, gods.

Brajovi, T. 1995. Poetika zanra, Beograd: Narodna knjiga/alfa. chase, r. 1980. The American Novel and its Tradition, Baltimore and london: The John hopkins university press. dillingham, W. B. 1972. An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Works of Herman Melville. athens: u of Georgia p. eko, u. 2002. O knjizevnosti. Beograd: Narodna knjiga/alfa. fry, N. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study in the Structure of Romance, cambridge: harvard university press. Kermode, f. 1976. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. cambridge: harvard university press. Kirby, d. 1993. Herman Melville. New york: a frederick ungar Book. Marceti, a. 2004. Figure pripovedanja. Beograd: Narodna knjiga/alfa. Melville, h. 1969. Typee, A Peep at Polynesian Life. evanston, il: Northwestern up/ Newberry library. prop, V. 1982. Morfologija bajke. Beograd: prosveta. Recnik knjizevnih termina. 1986. Beograd: Nolit. ruse, Z. 1995. Narcis romanopisac: Ogled o prvom licu u romanu. sremski KarlovciNovi sad: izdavacka knjizarnica Zorana stanojevia. scholes, r. r. Kellog. 1966. The Nature of Narrative. oxford: oxford university press. seymour, c. 1987. ,,Karakter u pripovijednom tekstu&quot;. Zagreb: republika l / 5-6. stan, c. 1996. The Weaver God, he Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel. Kent, ohio: The Kent state university press. staton, shirley, ed. 1987. Literary Theory in Praxis. philadelphia: The university of pennsylvania press. Vukievi, d. 2004. ,,realisticki junak u srpskoj knjizevnosti&quot;. Beograd: Knjizevnost i jezik, li / 1. SU M M A RY M e lV i l l e ' s Na r r aT i V e s T r aT e Gi e s a s a c h a l l e NGe : T h e M i M e sis of c h a r ac T e r a s a r e du N da Nc y ? The aim of the paper is to reconsider the aspects of characterization of Tommo, Melville's first hero, in the novel Typee, a Peep at the Polynesian Life, published in 1846. after summarizing the basic aspects of characterization in general, we have concentrated on the situational demonstration of his peronality and hero's psychology in certain phase of his life. We have concluded that the concept of characterization in the first novel is rather complex, and that nominalization and the portrayal of the hero, especially the way in which the corporeal is presented in the novel, are highly important, both for the sailors who leave the ship at Nuku-hiva, and for the islanders that they meet there. in the theoretical sense we have based our research upon the work of d. Vukicevic, M. Bakhtin, W. dillingham, and p. Bellis.

having described himself as primarily &quot;a passionately religious man&quot;1 (lawrence 1955: 17), lawrence understands his work to be a deep religious response to the living cosmos and an intense ontological yearning to be (elijade 2003: 70). Being man, he is profoundly convinced, means being a thought-adventurer. While, rather than being a mere combination of the acquired information, &quot;the juggling and twisting of already existent ideas&quot; (lawrence 1998: 226), within the impassive cartesian cogito, real knowledge (by a &quot;super-scientific grace&quot; (lawrence 1996: 216)) sprouts from the immediate sensual recognition of an unknown world. in one's genuine attendance to the other, &quot;in his wholeness wholly attending&quot; (lawrence 1998: 226), one adventures into the unknown, risking all the inherited conceptions (including the &quot;old stable&quot; ego), and becomes transported to another ontological level, where he transcends the misery of time and acquires freedom to create. in other words, he restores the crucifixion within himself and, finally, gains grounds to fulfil his existence as man, to become a &quot;natural aristocrat,&quot;2 a doorway to the transcendent truth. as sybilla from cuma begs freedom from the prison of her old body, so does lawrence become embittered with the culture in which &quot;[t]here is no outside. There is only more knowledge to be added&quot; (lawrence 1961: 617) which makes us &quot;people of postponed destiny&quot; (lawrence 1980: 32). lawrence argues that instead of living as a whole man alive, as an organic unit of the whole reality, which is man's greatest responsibility3 (&quot;i am part of the sun as my eye is part of me,&quot; he says (lawrence 1980: 126)), democratic man lives by &quot;the cohesive force of `love' and the resistant force of the individual `freedom'&quot; (lawrence 1980: 123) which is understood through individual isolation. resisting unnaturally our relation with the other means creating our individuality from ourselves, which repeatedly recalls the original sin into the world. in terms of eschatological metaphysics, only in our response to the other, when love overcomes isolation, by communication of &quot;i&quot; and &quot;thou&quot;, lies man's true nature, our freedom and sacredness. in our world &quot;the sun is outside of me,&quot; says Nikolai Berdjaev, and that &quot;indicates my fallen condition,&quot; while free of reification it must be &quot;within me and radiate from me&quot; (Berdjaev 2000: 59). But not in the sense of naïve realism, which in his perspective turns into unintelligent

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subjectivism for it implies that the unknown world does not exist, a notion that renders philosophy devoid of raison d'ètre. When the naïve man of today states that he recognizes as real only what he perceives, he actually admits, believes Berdjaev, that the reality of the world depends only on the perceiver. in a similar manner, lawrence finds that the science of his time turns the unique world of phenomena, the &quot;confusion of vitalities,&quot; into a mass of objects, seeing the reality in what is but a cultural play, mostly a linguistic activity. for example, in the episode from Women in Love in which Gudrun and ursula walk through the woods and notice a robin, they immediately apply human attributes to it. Gudrun assumes that the robin feels important, while ursula names it &quot;a little lloyd George of the air&quot; (lawrence 1996b: 229-30). The object being merely what the thought speculates about, becomes thus the least real, the least existential of all things. pointing to the absurdity of such an attempt at identification of reality with what we are or what we possess, lawrence attempts to put himself in the mind of a kind brown hen: But that is what i want: that she shall nod to me, with a `Howdy!' ­ and i shall nod to her, more politely: `How-do-you-do, Flat-foot?' [...] she might as well address me: `Oh my skin-flappy split pole!' Which would be like her impudence. skin-flappy, of course, would refer to my [...] baggy cord trousers. how would she know i don't grow them like a loose skin! (1961: 433) This projection of the limitedness of the transcendental subject into the outer world lawrence calls &quot;all that lady of shalott business&quot; (lawrence 1996b: 33) anthropomorphism and connaisance, and Berdjaev calls reification through cognition or fall into objectification (2000: 50-63). elsewhere lawrence impatiently asks: &quot;do you imagine the great realities [...] are only symbols of something human?&quot; (1961: 479) on the contrary, the outer world is indifferent to the contents of mind; if we attempt at truly attending, it will always reply, to use forster's metaphor from the Marabar caves, in the same incomprehensible tongue ­ &quot;`bou-oum,' or `ou-boum.'&quot; however, it has long been argued in philosophy that consciousness and the world of phenomena are made possible exactly by the unknowable background of things. The life, which exists out of mind, does appear in the mind only with active participation of the speculative subject. But the subjective mind is not absolute; &quot;the mind has no existence by itself,&quot; lawrence says, &quot;it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters&quot; (1961a: 126). it behaves as a traveller who looks at the country, which he passes by. Nevertheless, the traveller must know that &quot;[i]t is not the country which passes by and fades, it is not the sun which sinks to oblivion. Neither is it the flower that withers, not the song that dies out.&quot; (lawrence 1961a: 375) Berdjaev suggests that man's unrestful quest for knowledge and affirmation of his situation should imply recognition of the usage of an inadequate terminology. Namely, we are accustomed to speak about an object of our thoughts, whereas he proposes thinking about a subject, i.e. a living presence that responds to us. in other words, he suggests knowing out of reification. Because the truth is not knowledge of an object but victory over reification, which assumes a meeting

between two subjects in the mystical experience in which all is in me and i am in all, the moral postulate of the existentialist philosophy should be to liberate man's personality and his relation with the other of that mistaken definition of man as an object. further on, as man creates objects and God creates subjects, Berdjaev argues, man should not be approached as an object but as a collocutor, just as God is not an object but a collocutor. There is always something in the subject which eludes our conscious knowledge (&quot;[t]his is because the sun is always sun beyond sun beyond sun&quot; (1961a: 375), lawrence may say), something transcendent, unknown, and perhaps incomprehensible. if alterity were not immanent to its constitution, as levinas argues (1999: 28), all the phenomena would be but an intentional structure of mind. in lawrence's poetical language this thought assumes the following expression: unless the sun were enveloped in the body of darkness, would a cast shadow run with me as i walk? unless the night lay within the embrace of light, would the fish gleam phosphorescent in the sea, would the light break out of the black coals of the hearth, would the electricity gleam out of itself, suddenly declaring an opposite being? (lawrence 1961a: 370) Therefore, to gain real knowledge, our thought must always be turned to this wonder, this advent of unknown life; it must immerse into the dark unknown and probably incomprehensible sphere, when we are obliged to act morally, i.e. to be true to the authenticity we perceive, wondering to evoke its mystery. Ego cogito, ergo sum must be read in a different way ­ in my openness towards this &quot;strange presence&quot; (lawrence 1961a: 618) which is &quot;without me [...] beyond me, not me,&quot; (lawrence 1961b: 38) who is manifestation of the other, or the other himself. This openness is what lawrence calls thought adventure and it enables realization of being. in so far as i am i, a being who is proud and in place, i have a connection with my circumambient universe, and i know my place. When the white cock crows, i do not hear myself, or some anthropomorphic conceit, i hear the not-me, the voice of the holy Ghost. (lawrence 1961b: 481)

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facing the other, man becomes constituted as persona. in eschatological ontology, as richard Kearney explains in his book The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion, persona is not understood as a natural category but as a creative act; hence it is not self-sufficient, egocentric, but it passes into the other, into &quot;thou&quot;. persona is also a synonym for the otherness of the other, that which &quot;resides beyond my intentional horizon&quot; (Kearney 2005). richard Kearney makes an assumption that as an inimitable singularity, persona becomes an eschatological aura of &quot;possibility&quot; (2005), and as such it belongs to me. Moreover, i have priority over it because it confirms me in the immediate presence, in reality. in chapter &quot;continental&quot; in Women in Love, for example, leaving the known world of england with its lights fading away, ursula also abandons the social mask defined in that surrounding, and, expecting a new life, feels like being born again:

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ursula went on in an unreal suspense [...] she was not herself, ­ she was not anything. she was something that is going to be ­ soon ­ soon ­ very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent. (lawrence 1996b: 337)

in this image of ursula feeling &quot;her soul stirring to awake from its anaesthetic sleep&quot; (1996b: 337), lawrence also hints at his already well developed conception of nothingness as the main condition of birth. We find it also in his metaphor of flowering, in which the centre of the flower is nothingness which will forever stay unknown to us, but which is exactly the possibility of blossom and the petals that surround it (crummet 1999: 19-20). This nothingness, therefore, is not a sphere of absence, but the sphere of the yet unknown and the conventionally unnameable. eschatological metaphysics understands &quot;nothing&quot; as the &quot;divine Nothing,&quot;4 not as emptiness but as a primary and absolutely perfect principle prior to God and the world, like a seed which keeps in itself a possibility of the holy Ghost, like paul in the end of the novel, &quot;himself [...] at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing&quot; (lawrence 1976: 510). in The Rainbow, also, one is said to be &quot;merely an unfixed something-nothing, blowing about like the winds of heaven, undefined, unstated&quot; (lawrence 1996c: 267). furthermore, richard Kearney observes persona as a dwelling place of God, which exists as a possibility of being (rather then actuality, fait accompli), and, therefore as the promised kingdom. however, the promise remains powerless until and unless we respond to it. responding to the other, man exists in an ec-static way. as lausevi explains, it is not possible to say i am unless i am brought into relation, but then i expose to vulnerability this first &quot;i am&quot; (2002: 145) or, in lawrence's words, my old stable ego. This process also understands the risk lawrence talks about. &quot;We have to meet,&quot; he says, &quot;as i meet a jaguar between the trees in the mountains, and advance, and touch, and risk it. [...] Take the risk, make the adventure. [...] But with man, it is a thought-adventure. he risks his body and blood.&quot; (lawrence 1961a: 620). elsewhere, he says: life is travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken. We cannot know beforehand. We are driven from behind, always as over the edge of the precipice. it is the leap taken into the beyond, as a lark leaps into the sky, a fragment of earth which travels to be fused out, sublimated, in the shining of the heavens. (lawrence 1961a: 374) elaborating on the idea of man's responsibility, Sijakovi goes on to say that my response to the other, actually creates the very relation which makes me possible ­ and that is love. Because, responding to the other, i do it in front of the Third, who is the original other, i.e. the first (Sijakovi 2002: 71). The inducible nature of the other, who determines me, does not mean that the other is perfect, absolute, complete, out of his relation with me, because he does not force this responsibility on me, neither does he subordinate me to him, in his will, but i am free to chose this responsibility (Sijakovi 2002: 71). &quot;[i]n a new adventure,&quot; lawrence says, man &quot;dares take thought [...] for what he has done and what has happened to him. and daring to take thought, he ventures on, and realizes at

last.&quot; (1961a: 620). This is the kind of responsibility, i suppose, rupert Birkin from Women in Love seeks when he asks for a relationship that would transcend the phantom forms of social situation5 and build on, what he calls, the impersonal roots of being: from &quot;a beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision, some of them&quot; (lawrence 1996b: 124). he hopes they might find &quot;love that is like sleep, like being born again, [...] like death [...] so we are found different.&quot; (lawrence 1996b: 160). in Otherwise of Being levinas argues that to be open to the alterity of being does not mean a possibility of knowing it, because in that way we would think the transcendent as an object and again attempt at appropriating it (1999: 268-273). The same awareness forms the starting point of lawrence's poetics. he repeats time and again that the mysterious reality of the real lies in the mystical fourth dimension, which cannot be measured; because measuring reduces the wonderful world of differences, &quot;confusion of vitalities,&quot; to a monistic universe and thus denies it. Therefore the paradoxical nature of knowing the other ­ in an ontological sense, as nothing, in a hermeneutical sense, as unknowable, and in a linguistic sense, as inexpressible (Sijakovi 2002: 41-42). or, as lawrence says, &quot;[l]ife travels in flame from the unseen to the unseen, men will never know how and why.&quot; only the holy Ghost knows the nature of different manifestations ­ but &quot;heaven only knows what the holy Ghost is!&quot;(1984: 188) hence, for example, as rosemary sumner points out, those &quot;innumerable negatives&quot; in lawrence's work ­ &quot;untranslatable&quot;, &quot;unloving&quot;, &quot;inhuman&quot;, to name some from the list she gives (2000: 16). in his Essay in Eschatological Ontology, Berdjaev confirms this notion saying that knowing the truth means to be aware of the meaning that is forever born and reborn in being. Working along the same line, contemporary Greek philosopher John Zizioulas understands that the given, that which is already there, actually belongs to the past, whereas, for eschatological ontology, the truth of being lies in the future. as the relation with the other is the relation with the future, which is out of the grasp of humanity and can never be had, it is also a &quot;call to the salvation of our rationality from this bondage to the past&quot; (Zizioulas 2005). daniel J. schneider, who finds in lawrence's art another alternative to logocentrism, observes that lawrence was aware of this &quot;belatedness of thought.&quot; he quotes Birkin's argument: &quot;you can only have knowledge [...] of things concluded, in the past. it's like bottling the liberty of last summer.&quot; (schneider 1992: 163). in his essay &quot;Why the Novel Matters&quot;, in the image of the hand which moves, touches, and learns things, lawrence's theory of knowledge, as elizabeth Wallace has also observed, (1990: 105-106) develops into an assertion that being fully here and now, which is &quot;a struggle into conscious being,&quot; forces us towards the unknown and towards the future. &quot;This knowing [...] is a force active in the immediate rear of life,&quot; says lawrence, &quot;and the greater its activity, the greater the forward, unknown movement ahead of it&quot; (1984: 41). The intersection of these two movements, as elaborated in &quot;The crown&quot;, when noumenal breaks into phenomenal (as is embodied, for example, in the symbol of twilight), when God becomes revealed to a being, is timeless. at the same time, it is both the beginning and the end. in other words, it is when the consummation of being happens and man enters existential time, as different from the cosmic or historical times, which Berdjaev calls fallen

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times.6 illustrative of this is the conversation between connie and clifford in Lady Chatterley's Lover. While clifford listens with distrust to connie's unconcern for &quot;plato's ideas, and heaven, and those things&quot; (lawrence 1978: 64), connie only hopes that she will have enough strength to put her life in the hands of God: &quot;immortality can't be anything we know. it can only be something we feel,&quot; she says. &quot;if i don't feel i'm immortal now, what's the good of fussing about it later on?&quot; (lawrence 1978: 64-5). Quite paradoxically, as lausevi argues, to be in time and of time already means to be out of mere existence, because time makes us capable of relation; it is exactly in time that encounters happen (1999: 39-40). lawrence strongly believed that human body provides a clear example of the mutual interdependence of phenomena and noumena, materiality and meaning. in his seminal book Phenomenology of Perception, M. Merlau-ponty says that human body is the way for authentic thought and authentic speech, becoming thus a real symbol of man. Moreover, in the moment of sensual recognition (of this &quot;beyondness&quot;) we feel life most directly, because, Berdjaev explains, this recognition is unavoidably followed by passion ­ and it is exactly this passion that makes an active breakthrough towards meaning and annuls time for an adventuring man, who in turn feels only his naked being. &quot;Man is himself the vivid body of life,&quot; lawrence says in Study of Thomas Hardy. &quot;altogether devoid of knowledge and conscious motive is he when he is heaving into uncreated space, when he is actually living, becoming himself.&quot; (lawrence 1984: 42). Therefore, realization takes place and remains out of time. The perfect relation is perfect. But it is therefore timeless. and we must not think to tie a knot in Time, and thus make the consummation temporal or eternal. The consummation is timeless, and we belong to Time, in our process of living. (lawrence 1961a: 412) life, which is man's leap into the unknown, is born into the curving shape of the body, which connects the spaces of heavens with the spaces of earth. This curving shape is also present in the rainbow, which is Biblical sign of pledge between God and men, as it &quot;gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere&quot; (lawrence 1996c: 467) in freedom and love. Being the arch of spectral colours, which brings together the rays of the sun and the raindrops, which is water the sky returns to the earth, the rainbow connects the infinities of earth and heaven. in its bent shape ursula sees &quot;the earth's new architecture [...] the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven&quot; (lawrence 1996c: 467). in a similar manner, in lawrence's novel Kangaroo, richard somers observes: &quot;The rainbow was always a symbol to him [...] a pledge of unbroken faith, between the universe and the innermost.&quot; (lawrence 1960: 173). This rainbow reminds of heidegger's conception of the bridge, which does not connect the already existing riversides, but they become such only when the bridge rises in an arch above the river. still, the riversides thus brought into relation are not indifferent borders of land, but they open further away to the spaces and hills spreading behind. Moreover, the bridge, as an arching gate over the river, also connects the sky, rain and snow that make the water rise, and so it also gathers the

opposites. however differences of these phenomena are not obliterated within this ring-like relating, but recognized as such (hajdeger 1982: 91-93). further on, in Book of Revelation (10:1), an angel, &quot;clothed with a cloud [with] a rainbow was on his head,&quot; approaches John and raises his right hand towards the heaven swearing &quot;by him who lives forever and ever [...] that there should be delay no longer&quot; (10:6), i.e. that the miserable time of disintegration and suppression, the time of the past and the fear of future will stop. in this way, human history becomes a drama of realization of man's freedom and salvation. Besides, the eschatological world is not to be obtained in a linear process of appropriation ­ it is rather a parallel world, residing in us and always about to happen. When we go to heaven or go to hell, we don't go anywhere, because there is &quot;nowhere to go,&quot; lawrence says (1980: 48-50). or, as Margaret atwood writes in Alias Grace, &quot;when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. and somebody else comes in.&quot; (atwood 1997: 37, italics ­ M.K.). in lawrence's symbolism of the transcendent, the Morning/evening star has a prominent place. it transcends man and transcends knowledge, keeping in itself the realities of water, earth, and sky. ramon, as a natural aristocrat, is a saviour who keeps in himself this star but can never determine it in words, as it is always &quot;beyond the white of whiteness,/ Beyond the blackness of black,/ beyond the spoken day,/ Beyond the unspoken passion of night&quot; (lawrence 1996a: 346). it is the mysterious link between man's blood and the universe, the authentic, inducible part, which gives woman her womanhood and to man his manhood. But it exists outside of human will: &quot;you don't have it of your own will,&quot; says ramon. &quot;it comes from ­ from the middle ­ from the God. Beyond me, at the middle, is the God.&quot; (lawrence 1996a: 63). responding to this new categorical imperative,7 ramon expands the space for life, enables new relations between man and universe, and, thus, becomes the bridge, an abode of the holy Ghost. When he allows his beloved into his heart, he becomes able to transcend his historical place, his temporal and spatial situation, and experience himself as personified life energy. he transfers his esoteric knowledge to his followers which enables them themselves to realize as an abode for one another. [a]t twilight,&quot; teaches ramon, &quot;between the night and the day; man and woman, in presence of the unfading star, meet to be perfect in one another. lift your face, caterina, and say: This man is my rain from heaven. This woman is the earth to me ­ say that, cipriano. (lawrence 1996a: 295). This encounter allows admission to eternity through the other. &quot;if they have met as earth and rain,&quot; says ramon, &quot;so that a meeting has come to pass [...] then shall neither of them betray the abiding place where the meeting lives like an unsettling star.&quot; (lawrence 1996a: 295). for lawrence, the symbols of genitals and sexual intercourse have cosmic connotation and hierophantic significance. Thus the little stone houses by female etruscan tombs are interpreted as birthplaces of life, 8 while the carving of phallus on the male tombs becomes a symbol of creative recreation of life, as &quot;[w]ith the mystery of phallus goes all the beauty of the world, and beauty is more than knowledge&quot; (lawrence 1978: 156). This also enables lawrence to easily connect phallus with the cross, which, as Mirca eliade teaches us, represents the cosmic Tree ­ placed in the centre of the universe like an axis, so that the symbol of

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crucifixion represents man's threefold existence: in matter, in spirit, and through the unity of life and death (2003: 87-90). The cross, as an ancient symbol, has an inevitable phallic reference. But it is far deeper than sex. it is the self which darkly inhabits our blood and bone, and for which the ithyphallus is but a symbol [...] and on this cross of division in the whole self is crucified the christ. We are all crucified on it. (lawrence 1961a: 619)

The openness of the body on the cross, as it also symbolizes assumption, represents that what being is all about, the door to the other worlds. With his arms widely spread,9 man starts feeling his cosmic foundation and the presence of things that are other, radically different, not himself. Thus, he acquires a &quot;feeling awareness&quot; of the immediate presence, breaks off with profane existence, and becomes creator. in his religious and mystic response to the life perceived, to &quot;the felt but unknown flame,&quot; feeling that the inherited language makes his work already past before it actually happens,10 lawrence finds another foundation to his work. To be &quot;a bright book of life&quot; means to be true to the wonderful presences that transcend it, to tremble &quot;in-between&quot; the imminent and the transcendent truth, as an attempt at communicating the incommunicable. This also assumes becoming free of the necessity, existing in the way of the etruscan chimera that presents a lion but which &quot;at the same moment&quot; could be &quot;also a goat and not a goat&quot; (lawrence 1994: 68). When this disobedience materialized into lawrence's narrative world, it provoked protest among various lawrence's critiques who insisted that his novels lacked form. The noncompliant narrative of Kangaroo's, for example, forced, among other things, a conclusion that it is not a novel at all, but rather a failure of art.11 The same attempt at avoiding conventionality and ready-made forms in art is obvious in lawrence's books of travel, where the narrator is forced to relate his impressions being all the time aware that his words are false, while his choice of narrative clearly witnesses this awareness, as in its descriptive passages it insists on the vacillating modifiers.12 in his essay &quot;paradoxy of the Mystical Knowledge of God&quot;, Bogoljub Sijakovi elaborates that, as &quot;the mystical experience of unity with God is a communication with transcendence,&quot; it is reportable only &quot;in a completely other language, in the language that ceases to be language&quot; (2002: 59). a mystic wants to think speech and silence in their identity and not in difference. The very word `mystique' () [...] is derived from the verb `myo' () ­ to speak `my' (), namely to utter everything that can be told when we hut our mouth: in this `M' speech and silence are together. paradoxical, isn't it? (Sijakovi 2002: 60-61)

lawrence's mystic experience forces him, an artist in words, to fight back language to its very limits and make it transcend itself. ignoring stylistic rules, following logical and poetic vortex of the old living symbols, recreating the narrative of rituals, for example in repetitions, relying on paradoxes and remaining

faithful to a perceived &quot;instability of balance,&quot; lawrence makes his work, a frontier zone of narrative. as his complex narrative structure pushes towards the inexpressible, like in Will's enamoured experience of the cathedral in The Rainbow, or in lawrence's famous oxymoron, &quot;blood-consciousness,&quot; that carries across the heterogeneous semantic fields, it opens spaces of freedom and transcendence. supplementing and reanimating rather than substituting for life, as Jack stewart observes, in an exchange of energy, synergy, as a &quot;restructuring of perceptions that stimulates the endless play of creative consciousness with forms&quot; (2002: 134) as &quot;a tremulation&quot; that can make &quot;the whole man alive tremble,&quot; (lawrence 1984: 195)13 lawrence's work embodies an act of becoming, it is the truest embodiment of the &quot;thought-adventure&quot; ­ the bridge, an abode of God ­ so that it is also possible to speak about his narrative eschatology or eschatological narrative.

1 &quot;To edward Garnett, 22 april, 1914&quot;. 2 cf. d. h. lawrence, &quot;aristocracy&quot;. 3 cf. Ibid, p. 125. 4 in the negative theology of dionysius the areopagite &quot;divine Nothing&quot; is the realm out of which God created the world. 5 With all its complexity that encompasses, as r. d. laing summarizes, &quot;[h]is identity-for-himself, identity others ascribe to him, the identities he ascribes to them, the identity or identities he thinks they attribute to him, what he thinks they think he thinks they think ...&quot; r. d. laing, Self and Others, harmondsworth: penguin, 1971, p. 50. 6 in his essay &quot;history and eschatology&quot;, Berdjaev defines three types of time: cosmic, historical, and existential. While cosmic and historical times refer to precise past points in time and, therefore, are qualified with inertia, &quot;existential time&quot; happens in present and is supertemporal. similar notion may be found in Mornings in Mexico. 7 &quot;We must change back to the vision of the living cosmos; we must. [...] That is how man is made. i accept the must from the oldest pan in my soul, and from the newest me. once a man gathers his whole soul together and arrives at a conclusion, the time of alternatives has gone. i must. No more than that. i am the first Man of Quetzalcoatl. i am Quetzalcoatl himself.&quot; Ibid, p. 283. 8 &quot;and that is what it is, the ark, the arx, the womb. The womb of all the world, that brought forth all the creatures. The womb, the arx, where life retreats in the last refuge.[...] in which lies the mystery of eternal life, the manna and the mysteries.&quot; d. h. lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, p. 110. 9 This motion is also present in the image of ramon performing ritual in his room in The Plumed Serpent. 10 cf. Jean-françois lyotard, &quot;answering the Question: What is postmodernism?&quot;, in peter Brooker (ed), Modernism / Postmodernism, london and New york: longman, 1999, pp. 139-150. 11 cf. &quot;Kangaroo is hardly a novel. it is at best an effort, a futile effort, to solve a problem.&quot; eliseo Vivas, The Failure and the Triumph of Art, london: allen and unwin, 1960, p. 16. 12 cf. Marija Knezevi, Lorens u Italiji, Beograd: Zaduzbina andrejevi, 2002, str. 15-24; and Marija Knezevi, &quot;Translating lawrence into serbian. Twilight in Italy&quot;, Englishes: Literature Inglesi Contemporane, No 18, anno 6, rome, 2002.

fac i NG T h e oT h e r : a N aT T e M p T aT e s c h aTol o Gic a l i N T e r pr eTaT ioN of d. h . l aW r e Nc e ' s Wor K having described himself as primarily &quot;a passionately religious man,&quot; lawrence understands his work to be a deep religious response to the living cosmos and an intense ontological yearning to be. Being man, he is profoundly convinced, means being a thought-adventurer. While, rather than being a mere combination of the acquired information within the impassive cartesian cogito, real knowledge sprouts from the immediate sensual recognition of an unknown world. in one's genuine attendance to the other, one ventures into the unknown, risking all the inherited conceptions and becomes transported to another ontological level, where the misery of time is transcended and freedom to create is acquired. in an attempt to give my interpretation of lawrence's text an eschatological frame, i draw on the rich field of research carried out in eschatological metaphysics, while primarily relying on the work of Nikolaj Berdjaev. KEYWORDS: the other, eschatological, religious, mystic, ontological, being, cartesian, transcendental subject, reification, thought-adventure.

The city of Glasgow has been a complex space in the history of scotland. its strong working-class connections date back to its progressive transformation into the &quot;second city&quot; of the British empire, and can be traced through its later economic and social decay after World War ii. since the beginning of the twentieth century Glasgow has been frequently portrayed in literature so as to highlight its difference from aristocratic or bourgeois edinburgh, the other great urban area in the nation, which has sometimes been iconic in the representation of a romanticized scotland. in spite of the multiple literary Glasgows coexisting with the &quot;real&quot; one, such as the &quot;small city&quot;, &quot;hard city&quot;, &quot;Kaleidoscope city&quot; or &quot;deep city&quot; described by Moira Burgess in her comprehensive Imagine a City. Glasgow in Fiction (1998), Glasgow became particularly visible as the symbol of a new form of identity asserted by many intellectuals in the interwar period, when some nationalists of the heterogeneous scottish renaissance consolidated the city as home of the working-class man who would incarnate the soul of a doubly oppressed nation. yet, as Margery palmer Mcculloch remarks, even hugh Macdiarmid's &quot;a drunk Man looks at the Thistle&quot;, the urban poem that has become the emblem of the movement, &quot;is rooted in the imagery and language of [Macdiarmid's] Borders childhood and of the ballads and traditional scottish culture. Glasgow and the urban scene have no part in the drunk Man's quest for regeneration&quot; (2000: 100). it was not until the 1980's that Glasgow was vindicated with more persistency in the arts by the so-called &quot;Glasgow Group&quot;, that is, by Tom leonard, James Kelman, liz lochhead and alasdair Gray, chaired by philip hobsbaum. during this decade, the strong social and economic crisis affecting the lives of its inhabitants made many Glaswegian writers try to provide the space with the legitimacy it was denied by British institutions. in fact, as alasdair Gray's Mcalpin declares in the famous Lanark, it seemed impossible to access the meaning of the place when it had been denied so effectively for so long: &quot;think of florence, paris, london, New york. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history, books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively&quot; (1985: 249). it became

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necessary to act from two different angles; firstly, reconfiguring the imagination of this &quot;Mean city&quot; (Mcarthur and Kingsley long 1957) in recent history, and secondly, contesting what were considered new images of cultural prosperity imposed from the outside (Burgess 1998: 261) for the commemoration of Glasgow as european city of culture in 1990, but also in the many festivals of the late 1980s, with their slogans proclaiming that &quot;Glasgow's Glasgow&quot;, &quot;Glasgow's Miles Better&quot;, or trying to attract the attention of potential tourists in asking &quot;What's Glasgowing on&quot;. in fact, as angus calder stated: &quot;While in Glasgow culture officially replaces shipbuilding as the city's defining activity, the scottish intelligentsia can find their scotland and their own identity in their own activities and in the conceptions of scotland which they themselves use and create&quot; (1996: 223). The late 1980s witnessed the appearance of a new generation of Glasgowbased writers, some of whom explored the literary possibilities of the text provided by the city from gendered and ethnic perspectives. some of the early works of Janice Galloway, a. l. Kennedy and Jackie Kay became subjective attempts at deciphering the signs of a complex historical web of discourses inscribed on the space, which have determined the lives of its inhabitants as well as their representation. Kennedy's &quot;The role of Notable silences in scottish history&quot; is perhaps one of the best examples of these new perceptions of the city. The story, included in the collection Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990), reflects on the mechanisms employed in the transmission and the narration of history, as well as the intentional &quot;lies&quot; that fill the gap between what happens and how it is translated into the records of the city, or what some contemporary historians describe as the inevitable literary component of the historical text (White 1987). Glasgow becomes a textual space whose grammar depends on the interpretation attached to the names of the streets, the monuments, the many signs of identity addressing its characters as they walk by, discovering the &quot;lies about ships, the weather, trains, communal toilets, drink, pies, comedians, drunks, singers, happiness, tea shops, culture, blueprints, socialists, hunger, anger, clay, houses, capitalists, painters, hogmany and irn Bru&quot; (Kennedy 1999: 70-1). its first person narrator, a woman who confesses to lie compulsively, in her job as a semi-professional writer of random pieces for newspapers, manages to manipulate the meaning of the city's landmarks with her small acts of literary sabotage, when she invents plots for the death of fictional people or fictions about the life of real ones. she roams the streets of Glasgow reading the narrative of the city and the countless fictions of its inhabitants: This city makes you think like that. The roads come together, cross and go on and little strands of history follow them. in some places, many lines will cross: what has been, what it is and what will be and you can walk from one coincidence to another, not step on a crack. it's like strolling across a book, something big and Victorian with plenty of plots. it makes you wonder who's reading you. (Kennedy 1999: 67)

The large-scale project of the city can never be controlled in spite of the efforts made by the authorities or intellectuals to give coherence to its (hi)story if

people are turned into protagonists and secondary characters, in order to confirm the various narrative lines that become more appropriate at different times. although its connections are constantly changing and the scope of the relations among its inhabitants is immeasurable, this is not an obstacle for the elimination of unnecessary elements in the urban text, just as in any other kind of narrative. Being part of someone else's narration, it is impossible to access the overall sense of the text, and thus every individual action can only be evaluated in its immediate context, as Michel foucault stated:

architecture (...) is only taken as an element of support, to ensure a certain allocation of people in space, a canalisation of their circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations. so it is not only considered as an element in space, but it is especially thought of as a plunge into a field of social relations in which it brings about some specific effects. (1984: 253) on the one hand, such standpoint facilitates the destruction of any character's potential power to transform the narrative where it is included, but on the other, allows for the rewriting of the story if a change of focus happens and the elements are arranged differently in the text. in this sense, the narrator in Kennedy's story offers her own version of Glasgow proclaiming her right to alter the meanings of her city. By confessing her two passions &quot;When i am out in the city, i enjoy walking and when i am at home, i read&quot; (1999: 66), she is also confessing her passion for the city and her determination to obliterate the less humane side of its life: When i walk i see a wonderful city, built in blocks like Boston or New york. This makes it very inviting and hard to get lost in, because its shape is governed by a grid. There are also times, especially in winter, when the sky is solid blue, the sunlight rich and low and the city becomes beautiful. even where there are chip shops with metal shutters and the homes have putrefied around their tenants; even where there are beggars, really beggars, at the feet of each refurbished edifice, the light that falls here makes it beautiful. This is a city where ugly things happen under a beautiful light. (Kennedy 1999: 66-7)

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she intends to immortalise the city, to inhabit it imaginatively, so that Glasgow can be dignified for its dwellers, even if her contribution is insignificant, and shall only be noticed once another hypothetical reader of the space looks for an interpretation she ignores in the present. her aim is not to compensate for the absence of previous versions in the urban text, since she is known as an author keen on telling lies, but to reveal the strategies available to transform the meaning of Glasgow's signs, as she concludes in another foucaltian remark. i should immortalise our city's strange effects. it is in the habit of murdering. part of its construction is made for killing. people have built it like that; fatal but disinterested, like a gun. some of us live in the barrel of the gun

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and some of us do not. and some of us describe the mechanism and remind everyone how beautiful it is. (Kennedy 1999: 71)

a much more complex relation with the city is offered in Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1990), a novel about the titanic efforts of a female character to survive in the social after a mental breakdown, where the role of Glasgow and the segregation of the space is essential to understand the transformations undergone by its protagonist. Joy stone must reconstruct her identity, or what stuart hall has defined as the point of suture between &quot;on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to `interpelate', speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be `spoken'&quot; (2002: 5-6). her lack of a coherent identity has been interpreted as a metaphorical representation of scotland's state of anguish in the late 1980s: &quot;That `black hole', that `nothing at all' is the image not only of a woman negated by a patriarchal society but of a society aware of itself only as an absence, a society living, in the 1980s, in the aftermath of its failure to be reborn&quot; (craig 2001: 199). Joy cannot find a narrative line for her existence, and her obsessive analysis of the details of her life make her enter a spiral of destruction when she discovers there is no tangible truth she can reach. her fragmentation becomes more evident in the representation of her anorexic body, which is also closely related to the urban spaces she inhabits. Joy has decided to sacrifice her body to avoid the contradictory meanings it receives as a young woman, who is scottish, yet also British, middle-class, poor, separated, unfaithful, whose boyfriend has drowned still being married to another woman, and whose identity depends on the definitions other people give her. as Glenda Norquay has stated, &quot;The only way in which Joy can create meaning is to resist attempts at ordering her, to create chaos, as the novel itself does, by listing, cataloguing, quoting; the emptiness of such `order' becomes evident&quot; (2000: 132). in fact, such emptiness becomes clear in the different areas of the city where Joy lives, as well as in the way she shares those spaces with other people. elizabeth Grosz (1992) has highlighted the analogies between the body and the city, as well as the effects of the urban space on the construction of identities; the city determines the relation of the subject with itself, as well as with other selves, and the use of its space is fundamental to understand our perception of gender. Being traditionally linked to the domestic, women have only accessed the city recently, but still in different ways than men have. in fact, as Janet carsten and stephen hugh-Jones state, for women &quot;house, body and mind are in continuous interaction, the physical structure, furnishing, social conventions and mental images of the house at once enabling, moulding, informing and constraining the activities and ideas which unfold within its bounds&quot; (1995: 2). in this sense, Joy's four different homes parallel her physical and psychological transformations. The flat in the city where she lived with her first boyfriend is a claustrophobic place that made her feel trapped in her role as housewife, and where she developed her neurosis, given the extreme links she was expected to have with the space: &quot;i thought i was going crazy. (...) i became afraid

of leaving the flat in case [paul] could tell things by feeling the walls when i was out&quot; (1990: 42). once this relationship is broken, Joy moves to the only place that will provide her with some freedom and with a positive definition. in fact, there is a strong connection between Joy's psychological state in this part of the novel and the location of her small cottage: in a nice area in the outskirts of the city, near some shops and by a bus stop that connects her with any area in the city, and on a metaphorical level, with the social. however, when her affair with Michael, a married man, is discovered, both Joy and her house start to be invaded by a disease; Joy's progressive self-destruction mirrors the damage caused in the cottage by an invasion of mushrooms.

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looK i said and we both looked again. This one was more securely attached. it didn't break first time so Michael got a knife and cut it away from the side of the window. it left a little pink trail like anaemic blood where it had been growing. after a month there were little shoots of walls and baby mushrooms appeared overnight. (1990: 64) after Michael's death, and due to the deterioration of her own home, Joy has to move to the excessively large house he rented, which is located in a marginal area of Glasgow, badly connected to the city centre and with no facilities at all at hand, and which contributes to her detachment from the social, since &quot;it's too big really. There are four rooms. one is decorated as a bedroom and the others randomly. There isn't enough furniture to go round. (...) it never looks as good as i'd like&quot; (1990: 19). yet it is again her foucaultian confinement in a psychiatric hospital what will determine her complete alienation from the city. in this place she is no longer asked to have an identity of her own, nor to live according to the norms of a society that has marked her as incomplete; here she is only considered an insane patient, and therefore she is free to reconstruct her self, to learn how to &quot;keep breathing&quot;. in fact, after this traumatic, but also necessary, time there is hope for Joy at the ending of the novel. she manages to take control over her body again, at the same time that she finds the strength to come back to her cottage and start its reparation, symbolically repairing the bonds with the social she had previously been unable to maintain, but most importantly, showing her reconciliation with herself. Glasgow has also been portrayed as a space where different cultural communities coexist, the irish catholic community (Burrowes 2004), the highland migrants (Gunn 1991), although surprisingly enough, given, for example, the large asian population living in the city, not many &quot;ethnic&quot; writers have reached popularity, with the exception of Jackie Kay. in spite of the variety of themes in her work, many of her texts portray a scotland, but more frequently, a Glasgow where the negotiation of difference still remains unresolved, as she has stated: scottish people will either refuse to recognize my scottish accent, or my scottishness, or they'll say, `are you american?' and Black people will just hear my accent or think it really funny and say they've never met such a person before. and so being Black and scottish is always treated as a kind of anomaly. (Wilson 1990: 122)

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The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998), Why Don't You Stop Talking? (2002) show how to transcend social prejudice, and how to construct a positive definition for the self in a hybrid context. Glasgow usually becomes the point from which some of Kay's partially autobiographical characters and voices can articulate transnational or atlantic connections (Gilroy 1999) in search of cultural referents from other areas, like africa, or the usa. The influences they receive from the city are thus adapted to their needs when more positive elements participate in the definition of their alternative existence, as the author herself demonstrates in Bessie Smith (1997), where the biography of the singer emerges from the autobiographical connections between the writer and her teenage hero in a city with no other black referents at hand. in fact, her popular poem &quot;so you Think i'm a Mule?&quot;, which was inspired by a real incident in a pub in london (forbes 1998), portrays the general conception of the city as a white space. &quot;Where do you come from?&quot; `i'm from Glasgow.' &quot;Glasgow?&quot; `uh huh. Glasgow.' The white face hesitates the eyebrows raise the mouth opens then snaps shut incredulous yet too polite to say outright liar (...) &quot;ah, but you are not pure&quot; (...) &quot;Well, that's not exactly what i mean, i mean ... you are a mulatto, just look at...&quot; `listen. My original father was Nigerian to help with your confusion (...) i have to tell you: take your beady eyes offa my skin; don't concern yourself with the &quot;dialectics of mixtures&quot;; don't pull that strange blood crap on me Great White Mother. say, i'm no mating of a she-ass and a stallion no half this and half of that to put it plainly purely i am Black (...) The question &quot;Where do you come from?&quot; far from being a naive proof of the woman's curiosity inevitably translates into the irritating assertion &quot;you don't belong here&quot;, as Kay herself has stated in an interview: &quot;[e]ither they mean `Go back to where you came from,' or just have this obsessive curiosity that is all the time trying to deny the fact that you're scottish&quot; (Wilson 1990: 121).

The three examples that have been examined here are not intended to offer an exhaustive exploration of the many ways in which Glasgow has been imagined in contemporary literature, yet they show how the representation of the city has transcended local or national patterns to participate in more global debates. The influence of the artistic text on the city has transformed the relation of its inhabitants with the space, offering more complex and simultaneously liberating, possibilities for the definition of new identities. The adaptation of the city's signs from subjective standpoints and the legitimisation of such changes in the literary text have allowed for the reconfiguration of its specific features so that Glaswegians can find easier means to create their own cartographies of the place. REFERENCES

SU M M A RY u r Ba N l a N ds c a pe s a N d T e X T ua l spac e s : T h r e e p orT r aya l s of Gl a s G oW By a . l . K e N N e dy, Ja N ic e G a l l oWay a N d Jac K i e K ay The aim of this paper is to analyse recent changes in the literary representation of the city of Glasgow. This text revises the most significant approaches to the space in scottish culture in the twentieth century, from its highly masculinised working-class associations to more contemporary perspectives that negotiate ethnic and gender difference: The scottish renaissance of the inter-war period, the &quot;Glasgow Group&quot; of the late 1970s, and finally a younger generation of writers who began their careers in the late 1980s. in order to explore new literary cartographies of the city, this article focuses on the works of three of scotland's most recognised writers, a. l. Kennedy, Janice Galloway and Jackie Kay. firstly, from a foucauldian perspective, it considers Kennedy's &quot;The role of Notable silences in scottish history&quot; and its portrayal of Glasgow as a textual space. secondly, it studies gendered analysis of the city, such as linda Mcdowell's, to interpret Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing and its incorporation of female subjectivity in the segregation of the urban. finally, this paper considers the works of Jackie Kay and their negotiation of ethnic and sexual difference in the context. KEYWORDS: Glasgow, contemporary scottish fiction, a.l. Kennedy, Janice Galloway, Jackie Kay, space, gender.

1. t h E N EGAt i v E S to t h E NA R R At E d: t h E NoN NA R R At E d A N d t h E diSNA R R At E d The main thematic concern of Julian Barnes' collection of linked stories, The Lemon Table, is old age in its many forms. apart from this theme, however, obvious and explicit as it is, an analysis of the narrative techniques employed in Barnes' collection may help reveal another major theme: interpersonal communication as narration, or, rather, its almost complete absence. in order to approach the collection's many narrative gaps and distortions, it seems appropriate to employ the theoretical framework put forth by Gerald prince in his article entitled &quot;The disnarrated&quot; (1988). he deals here with the narrated and its negatives, the `nonnarrated' and the `disnarrated.' Gerald prince defines the `nonnarrated' as `something [that] is not told (at least for a while).' This would, according to harold Mosher, include strategies of implication like not naming or delaying the names of characters or objects, eliding words in dialogue, referring to but not reporting words characters must have said, not identifying antecedents for pronouns, leaving referents vague in characters' thoughts and speech, suppressing the thoughts of characters whose thoughts are otherwise revealed, [...] and entirely omitting the narration of acts that must have happened. (1993: 407) The responsibility for the nonnarrated more often than not rests solely with the characters, as it is usually a dramatization of their deceptions, including their self-deceptions. it is to be distinguished from the `nonnarratable,' which is, according to prince, what `cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating' (prince 1992: 28). prince defines the `disnarrated' as `the events that do not happen.' Mosher further elaborates this as `words that are not expressed but could/should have been, acts that could/should have been performed but are not, states that could/should have existed but do not, and objects that could/should have been produced but are not' (Mosher 1993: 407). he later adds that the term is also applicable to `those

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narrating cases in which one does not do what one intends, [...] that one loses what one has (as opposed to keeping it), that one does not obtain what one expects, and that one is not what one seems to be or could be.' (Mosher 1993: 415) disnarrating creates alternative, imagined or fabricated worlds often juxtaposed with the `real,' narrated one, and prince does not bestow this worldmaking faculty exclusively on the narrator; he is `adamant on distributing the ability to `disnarrate' equally among narrator and characters.' (christensen 2004: 43) in prince's own words, `terms, phrases and passages that consider what did not or does not take place [...] whether they pertain to the narrator and his or her narration [...] or to one of the characters and his or her actions constitute the disnarrated' (prince 1988: 3). actions of the characters that conjure up nonexistent worlds such as lies, fantasies and rationalizations would thus also qualify as the disnarrated. Texts rife with the negatives to the narrated seem to be more compatible with the unreliable narrator. Mosher goes so far as to assert that one of the main purposes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century move to eliminate the omniscient narrator was to `encourage the reader to imagine, to `write' (perhaps wrongly), the missing (nonnarrated) parts of the story or the alternatives (disnarrated) to the story' (1993: 419). The Lemon Table is demonstrably illustrative of this tendency. The vast majority of its narrators and focalizers are unreliable to a disturbing degree and the nonnarrated and the disnarrated abound on all narrative levels. communication is virtually nonexistent.

2 . t h E NoN NA R R At E d A N d t h E diSNA R R At E d i N T H E L E MON TA BL E Nonnarrating begins with the opening lines of The Lemon Table. referentless personal pronouns go on for a full page before the figural narrator of &quot;a short history of hairdressing&quot; is referred to by his first name, and he is only given a last name another thirteen pages and at least half a century further into the story. Gregory cartwright seems to be particularly prone to the variety of nonnarration prince refers to as `repression' (Mosher 1993: 409): he tends to omit or delay narrating the events that he finds unpleasant or unmemorable. it is three pages after her name is first mentioned that we discover `allie had broken it up,' and when an `allie' is brought up in a cursory way again, after years have apparently lapsed, we do not even know if it is the same woman. Their reconciliation and subsequent marriage can be written into the story by the reader, but are never narrated. The disnarrated in the first story pertains mostly to the misapprehensions, intentional or unintentional, brought about by the `customer banter' between Gregory and his hairdressers, especially the wrong impressions they get of each other. certain that the barber is a homosexual paedophile, young Gregory envisages an entire scenario of being seduced by the `perve' on a camping trip in the woods. Gregory the `revolutionary' student mentally paints an unfairly acrimonious picture of the `provincial mister two-point-four children, pay the mortgage, wash the car and put it back into the garage' (Barnes 2005: 11) that is cutting his hair. his own retort that his `shave' is `the way she likes it' alludes to a

nonexistent relationship which the hairdresser further disnarrates into a marriage. The misunderstanding remains unclarified for as long as it does because Gregory seems to be unable or unwilling to express his views. he, however, keeps coming up with imaginary rejoinders he never uses. This is the context in which the phrase `wanted to say,' a fairly frequent signal of the disnarrated as `words that are not expressed but could/should have been,' first appears in the collection. it appears once in &quot;The Things you Know,&quot; but Merrill does not really want to reveal Bill's homosexual tendencies to his widow Janice, and Janice herself is quite happy to keep Merrill unaware of her late husband Tom's infidelity. The truth about the two men is nonnarrated ­ significantly delayed for the reader and thoroughly repressed for the two widows. Both disnarrate their late husbands as needed. Janice uses Bill's `posthumous corroboration' whenever confused and lies outright about the state of his teeth, while Merrill reinvents Tom, who `had been drafted,' as a military man. Neither woman seems to be capable of envisaging a single unflattering detail about her deceased spouse and the reader can only learn about these from the other woman, by means of the story's variable focalization. The two widows subsist on their idealized, disnarrated versions of their late husbands. Major Jacko Jackson's life in &quot;hygiene&quot; is also sustained by his disnarrated `love affair' with Babs. as the story's figural narrator, he is responsible for much of its nonnarrated, by means of repression: the delay in revealing his name, with the consequent personal pronouns without antecedents that precede it, and the belated hints, barely sufficient for the reader to write into the story that Jacko is indeed having an affair, that the woman in question is in fact a prostitute much older than himself, and that they have not had intercourse in years because he is impotent. he also fails to acknowledge, and thus nonnarrates, the fact that he is crying ­ all the reader is told is that Jacko receives a handful of tissues with which he then dries his face. other information is nonnarrated by deferral through no fault of Jacko's, because it comes as news to him as well, like Babs' death and the fact that her name never really was Babs. Babs disnarrates her name to Jacko, and also his supposedly remarkable virility ­ this at a time when no trace of it whatsoever is left. Jacko disnarrates his potency to himself, as well as his purported reasons for no longer needing condoms. his attempt at narrating to himself a justification for his adultery is, in light of that, a disnarration too: `all he was doing was making sure his machinery was still in working order. old father Nature still lubricating the parts' (Barnes 2005: 72). The rationalizations he declines to use qualify as the disnarrated, being both untrue and an alternative to what is expressed: `he didn't say to himself, oh it's because i was all newted and owly at the time, and, oh it's because pam is like she is nowadays. Nor did he say, oh it's because Babs is blonde and i've always gone for blondes.' (Barnes 2005: 73). interestingly enough, dramatized intrusive homodiegetic (`first-person') narrators seem to be even less informative and nonnarrate more. The narrator of &quot;Vigilance&quot; never introduces himself, delays the introduction of his live-in ex-lover andrew, and only hints at being male (and therefore homosexual) ten pages into the story. The reason the couple broke up is also nonnarrated ­ delayed nine pages

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for the reader and never discussed by the characters. Whenever the topic is even remotely alluded to, it triggers an instant `We don't talk about that' from andrew. The narrator, developing hypersensitivity to noise upon being left to attend concerts unescorted, disnarrates entire scenes involving the culprits. he has long, elaborately admonishing conversations with them in his imagination, keeps coming up with impossible schemes for battling them, and his disnarrated excuse for tripping up a fellow concert-goer on the stairs is particularly ludicrous: `he was clearly in a hurry. probably wanted to hawk and spit and cough and sneeze and smoke and drink and set off his digital watch alarm to remind him to use his mobile phone' (Barnes 2005: 120). The homodiegetic narrator of &quot;appetite&quot; has perhaps a firmer grip on reality, but still tends to nonnarrate by omitting and delaying the narration of important information. her own sex and age, and the nature of her relationship with the patient she visits, are all considerably deferred, which is the reason behind numerous referentless pronouns. Viv, her nickname, is only mentioned in quite a perfunctory fashion three times during the story, and he remains unidentified throughout it. `i never say his name to get his attention, because he thinks i'm referring to someone else' (Barnes 2005: 172-173), she explains, and his identity, now decidedly nonnarrated, is effectively done away with. other identities are also nonnarrated. a `she' appears several times throughout the narrative, and though never explicitly identified as such by the narrator, can be inferred to be her husband's first wife. on the other hand, nothing can be inferred about the identity of the woman whom Viv's husband, in his delirium, repeatedly invites to have sex with him, mistakenly addressing Viv instead every time. is it his ex-wife, a lover or an imaginary person? No clues are given. The disnarrated in this story concerns the memories that the couple share ­ the only thing left to them in the situation they are in, and also the most difficult to retain. Viv's projection from the past is sadly illusory: `from the start he had the better memory, that's the joke of it. i used to think that i'd be able to rely on him, on him remembering' (Barnes 2005: 171). rather than remembering their past, the patient reinvents it, and Viv can only be sure that she cannot trust him. The intrusive narrator of &quot;The fruit cage&quot; seems only too eager to share all the information at his disposal, including his entire family history, his parents' characters, the village they live in and the old family washing machine. This chattiness, however, only masks his reluctance to divulge anything substantial about himself. his own nickname, chris, is only revealed in passing nine pages into the story, and his suspicions that his mother may be physically abusing his father and that his father may be having an affair remain nonnarrated. They are only verbalized by other characters. different accounts of the same events make up the disnarrated in the story. although common sense suggests that one of the versions could actually be true, i.e. narrated, it is often impossible to surmise which one it is, so all of them must remain at least potentially disnarrated. Both dorothy and stanley disnarrate stanley's bruise as being the consequence of `a fall.' elsie, on the other hand, claims dorothy hit him on the head with a frying pan. There are three versions of how stanley's Wednesday afternoons are passed ­ playing billiards at the British legion

club (the official story), having an affair with elsie (the narrator's presumption voiced to his father) and stanley's own final confession: `i mostly was down the club, son. i said billiards to make things simpler. sometimes i just sat in the car. looking at a field' (Barnes 2005: 189). dorothy and elsie have sharply contrasting accounts of stanley's final pre-paralysis days and particularly of what caused his condition. characters have disnarrated versions as well: dorothy, for instance, entertains a distorted image of elsie, or, as she refers to her, `Joyce' royce. The narrator also has a preconceived idea of what the `homewrecker' would be like: `i wanted to see scarlet fingernails and scarlet toenails. But no such luck' (Barnes 2005: 192). even the old washing machine has different versions in the memories of different family members. in the epistolary &quot;Knowing french,&quot; the entire other side of the correspondence is nonnarrated by complete omission. all the reader is presented with are the letters sylvia Winstanley writes to `Julian Barnes' and two letters he receives from `J. smyles (Warden).' The letters `Julian Barnes' writes have allegedly been destroyed and their content can only be deduced from sylvia's. sylvia disnarrates `Julian Barnes' as a character of Julian Barnes' ­ dr Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of Flaubert's Parrot. she (quite astoundingly for someone actually versed in french literature) believes him to be a doctor in his sixties because he `said' so in his book. she also reflects on what the life of a `famous person in art' who was in love with her when they were children and her own would be like if they had married, disnarrating the past and the present. &quot;The silence&quot; is written in the form of a journal. The name of the person keeping it is nonnarrated throughout the story, but it can easily be deduced to be Jean (Janne) sibelius, the famous finnish composer. his wife, referred to only as `a.' (sibelius' wife's name was aino), `operat[ing] with silence,' writes him a letter `after Gothenburg' which he promises to carry on him `until rigor mortis sets in.' Two pages and at least ten frantically revolving thoughts later, we finally get the rough contents of the letter and an account, nonnarrated via this delay, of the drunken incident in Gothenburg. one of a.'s chief merits seems to be her ability to refrain from speaking on painful topics. They `do not speak of' the narrator's alcoholism and he is also happy to report that `unlike everyone else she never asks when my eighth will be ready.' apart from disnarrating their never spoken words, the narrator also disnarrates his working habits: `at nights i compose. No, at nights i sit at my desk with a bottle of whisky and try to work.' others disnarrate him as successful: they `see only fame, applause, official dinners, a state pension, a devoted family, supporters across the oceans' (Barnes 2005: 207). he, however, despises these `trappings of success' and feels old, depleted and not overly satisfied with himself. another ageing artist's indiscretions are tackled in &quot;The revival.&quot; The exasperatingly intrusive heterodiegetic (`third-person') narrator hides nothing; he only leaves Turgenev's name nonnarrated until the very last page and completely omits that of the actress he falls in love with. The other narrative gaps can be more safely described as the nonnarratable ­ what cannot be narrated because it is in this case unknown to the narrator. The disnarrated, however, abounds in this

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story, mainly through the courtesy of Turgenev's tendency to daydream and create alternative realities in which he is united with his love. according to the narrator, his is `a love predicated upon renunciation, whose excitements [are] called if-only and what-might-have-been' (Barnes 2005: 90). after a shared train journey of which differing accounts exist in his letters, all of them probably wildly inaccurate, he disnarrates an entire episode in which he abducts her. he then projects their fantasy relationship into the future only to verify its impossibility. This does not prevent him from envisaging elaborate scenarios of their journeys to italy, traveling with her `in the past conditional.' Most notably, they disnarrate each other: to her, he is the author of the play she has fallen in love with; to him, she is Verochka, his own creation, literally narrated by him. The authorial narrator of &quot;Bark&quot; does not need to nonnarrate too much ­ the characters are sufficiently successful at doing that. delacour delays the revelation of his companion's name to lagrange, only to have him forbid the affair while withholding his reasons for doing so. it is not until lagrange's funeral that delacour learns the deceased was Jeanne's father. once he recognizes the nature of his feelings for Jeanne, he does not even consider sharing them with her. prior to that realization, he disnarrates their relationship in terms of necessary `hygiene,' and misconstrues the motive behind lagrange's admonition as jealousy of this function she performs for delacour's health. investing so much in his physical wellbeing, he cannot even envisage any outcome of the tontine other than his outliving the other thirty-nine subscribers. This clearly proves to be illusory when he is the thirty-seventh one to die. &quot;The story of Mats israelson&quot; is the story of the story of Mats israelson, a story never really told. it is a doubly nonnarrated and doubly disnarrated embedded narrative. When anders Bodén makes his first attempt at telling it to Barbro lindwall, his words are not reported. all we learn is that `he told it in the wrong order, and too quickly, and she did not appear interested. she did not even seem to realize that it was true' (Barnes 2005: 31). The story itself is then delayed for two more pages, when the reader has the privilege of witnessing the telling of it being practiced by anders, who is unaware that he will not be given another chance to do so. in its first rendition, the story is disnarrated ­ mistold and misunderstood ­ and for that very reason it develops into the narrated, as the matrix narrative becomes analogous to the embedded one. in other words, the story within the story affects the final outcome of the main story. Because of the way the story within the story is told, it becomes true ­ Barbro and anders' hearts remain frozen in time like Mats israelson in the copper mines of falun. anders convinces himself that `if he were to tell the story of Mats israelson correctly, it would make her say once more &quot;i would like to visit falun.&quot; and then he would reply &quot;i shall take you there.&quot; and everything would be decided' (Barnes 2005: 34). The very act of narrating thus becomes the chief disnarrated of the story. anders fantasizes about all the other things he could have told her and their effect on her, and Barbro has her own disnarrated `if only': `if only he could have read my heart before i did. i do not talk to men like that, listen to them like that, look them in the face like that. Why couldn't he tell?' (Barnes 2005: 36) she also has an unfounded fear that her daughter will marry his son.

Their story has many versions, and even the omniscient narrator cannot help establish which one is `true.' Their respective spouses, as well as `gossip' (almost personified), decide, after many vicissitudes, that anders and Barbro have had an actual affair. Barbro and anders' disnarrated, if-only, almost mythical version of their relationship, which sustains their entire lives, actually proves to be more real than what, now `sobered up,' they disnarrate to themselves and to each other during their final misunderstanding in the falun hospital. 3. NA R R At ioN A N d C oM M U N iC At ioN

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Misunderstandings abound in The Lemon Table, and some happen despite the best efforts to the contrary. Gregory knows he has `got it wrong' the first time he tells allie he loves her, and does not `seem to be saying it right' when he tries to engage in small-talk with his hairdresser, although he claims to have finally managed to `get the right tone' in `customer banter.' The narrator of &quot;Vigilance&quot; gets it right when he admits `it's hard to get it right.' Those who choose not to communicate achieve this via prevarication and repression, the latter often verbalized as `we don't talk about that,' `we do not speak of this,' and `he/she wanted to say' (but never did). sound metaphors heighten the prevalent mood of verbal isolation. Gunshots `awaken the echoes' in falun, and echoing that, echoes are what a large portion of Janice and Merrill's conversation boils down to (the rest of it being reserved for parallel monologues). after such an exchange, the statement `We're sharing,' made in reference to the bill, resounds with sarcasm. one of anders' favorite tourist sites is the deaf-and-dumb asylum. The sawmill laborer is run down by the steamboat because he is deafened by the water in his ears, and Gregory also gets water in his ears at the hairdresser's. sylvia is self-admittedly deaf, and anders, stanley and Viv's husband lose their powers of lucid speech towards their end, but all the characters are metaphorically both deaf and dumb to varying degrees. perhaps this is deemed necessary to prepare them for the oft mentioned `silence' which the collection's `submerged population group' (o'connor 1965: 18, 20-21), the elderly, is unavoidably journeying towards. finally, considering the great number of letters exchanged, postcards sent and dialogues reported, there is surprisingly little actual communication in The Lemon Table. in fact, the only successful articulation of genuine emotion in the book, stanley's `Just glad to see you' spoken to his son, merely causes `alarm' in chris, being such a `rare expression of direct pleasure.' The seeming impossibility of any real communication whatsoever demonstrably makes for one of the collection's main themes. The nonnarrated and the disnarrated in The Lemon Table quite frequently refer directly to acts of narration, most obviously so in &quot;The story of Mats israelson,&quot; where we are dealing with the difficulty of communicating an undeniable narrative. in terms of narrating as telling, relating, recounting, this tendency is obvious throughout the book. communication can be defined in the book as the willingness and ability to narrate on all levels, and characters, narrators and even the author himself (when he conveniently has his side of the

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correspondence destroyed in &quot;Knowing french&quot;) are deficient in one or both. The narrative techniques of nonnarration and disnarration are thus closely intertwined with the theme of absent communication-as-narration in The Lemon Table, making narration its own thematic focus.

on the basic narrative level, auster's novel reads as a story of friendship between a man and a dog, modeled partly on John steinbeck's Travels with charley1, and as a story of unfulfilled desires. literary works using animal narrators are hardly innovative now and auster's depiction of friendship between a dog and a man is rather sentimental and lyrical. What is more important for understanding auster's novel's meaning is the use of motifs, symbols, imagery, tropes and modes (parody, irony) through which auster points out and criticizes several aspects of american cultural identity, particularly the american dream (and the idea of achieving success). in addition, developing the motif of the american dream, auster points out the nature of the contemporary (postmodern) vision of the world influenced by media, popular culture and consumerism. auster also addresses the relationship between the dominant and the marginal, the center and the periphery, the important and the unimportant, which all contribute to his symbolic critique of the idea of the american dream. The imagery of the center and the periphery seems to dominate this novel. auster's use of this imagery is often related to the social and cultural status of his characters (belonging to and being rejected by the dominant culture) and is closely connected with the imagery of equality and inequality. Both Willy and Mr. Bones represent various aspects of the connection between the center and the periphery. Willy is a hybrid, marginal, displaced and peripheral character. on the most general level, his Jewish background (his real name is William Gurevitch) qualifies him to the position of a displaced and marginal character with a diasporic identity related to his ancestral heritage. his familial and social status as an outsider and an outcast, that is a character growing up in an incomplete family and rebelling against formal education, further emphasizes his displacement and marginality. Moreover, also his parents' escape from europe and their consequent social position in the usa significantly contribute to the formation of Willy's symbolic

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status of a displaced character. The narrator comments on his parents' escape from europe as follows: There were the ten days they spent hiding in an attic crawl space in Warsaw. There was the month long walk from paris to the free Zone in the south, sleeping in haylofts and stealing eggs to stay alive. There was the refugee internment camp in Mende, the money spent on bribes for safe conducts, the four months of bureaucratic hell in Marseille as they waited for spanish transit visas. Then came the long coma of immobility in lisbon, the stillborn son ida delivered in 1944, the two years of looking out at the atlantic as the war dragged on and their money ebbed away. By the time Willy's parents arrived in Brooklyn in 1946, it wasn't a new life they were starting so much as a posthumous life, an interval between two deaths. Willy's father, once a clever young lawyer in poland, begged a job from a distant cousin and spent the next thirteen years riding the seventh avenue irT to a buttonmanufacturing firm on West Twenty-eighth street (auster 1999: 13-14).

as can be seen from this extract, Willy's parents become not only ethnically, but also socially displaced characters. auster further develops the imagery of Willy's marginality and displacement status by depicting him as an unexpected child, as a child refusing his parents' authority, culture and identity, and by his becoming a half-orphan after his father's premature death in the usa. The narrator comments on Willy's relationship to his parents that &quot;he found them alien, wholly embarrassing creatures, a pair of sore thumbs with their polish accents and stilted foreign ways&quot; (auster 1999: 14). as a Jewish-polish boy, Willy is ethnically and socially marginal in the usa; and as an unexpected child and a half-orphan he becomes marginalized both socially and emotionally. auster, however, further complicates Willy's quest for personal and cultural identity through his developing of the imagery of the center and the periphery which finally results in the depiction of Willy as an entirely alienated, marginalized and outcast character both from within and from the outside. from within because he rejects what can be labeled as a center, that is his parents' Jewish culture and identity, and from the outside because although his first attempts to identify with the american dominant and popular culture seemingly lead him to acquire central status through appreciation of that culture and by being trained in u.s. educational institutions, he later loses his symbolic central position by becoming a dreamer searching for ideals, as well as by being mistreated by health institutions (in the state whose culture he so appreciated) after his &quot;schizo flip-out of 1968, the mad fandango of truth or consequences on a high-voltage tension wire&quot;, after which &quot;They shut him up in a hospital, and after six months of shock treatment and psychopharmalogical therapy, he was never quite the same again&quot; (auster 1999: 11). Willy's travels with Mr. Bones, his dog, elevate him to the status of a eternal traveler and cause him to lose his ethnic and social identity both literally and symbolically. literally, that is, by becoming alienated and isolated from educational, social (parents, family, school), commercial and cultural institutions (the major publishers who might possibly have published his writing, which is

2.

E qUA l i t Y -- i N E qUA l i t Y

auster's use of the imagery of equality and inequality is associated with both characters' status of living beings, with his depiction of different cultural identities, with the vision of the world both characters represent, with the relationship between high and low (popular) culture, and with different kinds of writing as represented in the novel. as analyzed above, from the social, economic and ethnic points of view, in developing the imagery of the center and the periphery, auster depicts Willy not only as a marginal, peripheral outcast, but also as an unequal character on various levels. Willy is socially unequal because of his family's lower class and social status; because of his rejection of his family ties, educational institutions, and the social status of an unproblematic citizen. on the basic narrative and semantic level, this manifests itself in Willy's rejection of his parents'

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not commercial and thus remains unpublished); and symbolically because he becomes an outcast and marginal to everything that creates the center, that is what is considered to be standard and the norm. he becomes an eternal marginal character, &quot;a tragic figure, disqualified ...from the rat race of vain hopes and sentimental illusions&quot; (auster 1999: 15). The imagery creating Willy's symbolic status of a marginal character is finally completed by his status of an eternal traveler reminiscent of the legendary figure of the Wandering Jew. reminiscent of this figure, Willy undertakes a symbolic journey between marginal and dominant positions and cultures within which his both literal and symbolic marginality seems to dominate. Mr. Bones represents another marginal character in several ways. his central, regular, common status of an animal (and his status of a typical animal of its kind) is undermined by his ability to think and make judgments which ironically elevates him to the status of a human being. in connection with his dog status itself, paradoxically, seen from the perspective of animals, the above qualities disqualify him from belonging properly to the dog/animal kingdom, thus providing him with rather a marginal position. This is further supported by Mr. Bones' travels after Willy's death. during these travels, despite being mostly kindly treated by humans, the understanding of his position by his new masters as &quot;central&quot; (that is common, according to the rules of logic since he is treated as a dog, not as a human being) enables him to acquire the status of a stereotypical and archetypal character (dog), which is the position he refuses (for example, by refusing to be tied up like other dogs). his search, especially after Willy's death, is not only a search for identity but also a romantic search for peace, friendship and freedom similar to Willy's. Willy and Mr. Bones thus become symbolically united by both having the status of marginal characters and searchers. at the same time, they both represent a certain alternative and opposition to the central, dominant and thus generally accepted culture and understanding of the world. Both characters become seekers of ideals that represent a rejection of the dominant, central moral, aesthetic, social, emotional and other codes and norms they have to struggle with. as this is an unequal struggle, auster's use of the imagery of the center and the periphery is therefore also closely connected with the imagery of equality and inequality.

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expectations about his career and social status (his refusal to take a regular and &quot;proper&quot; job that would bring him financial security, and his aspiration to become a writer), in his status of a half-orphan since his early childhood (he becomes socially and emotionally unequal to other children because of the incompleteness of his family), and in his rejection of educational and social institutions which qualifies him to a position of a rebel and outcast since he becomes a drug and alcohol addict, a homeless person, and a traveler. as the omniscient narrator, speaking from the point of view of the dog, Mr. Bones, says: &quot;...by the time he was ready to leave the house and go off to college, he had indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world (auster 1999: 16)&quot;. and, as he continues, Willy is &quot;a rambler, a rough-and-ready soldier of fortune, a one-of-a-kind two-leg who improvised the rules as he went along&quot; (28). Willy's inequality status further manifests itself in his position of an unpublished, untraditional and experimental rather than commercially successful and popular author. culturally, his ethnic background has historically cast him into the position of an ethnically unequal and displaced character if seen in the context of the historical understanding of the Jewish cultural identity. But, seen in this context, auster does not depict binary oppositions emphasizing the positive as opposed to the negative side, like one and the other pole of a binary opposition, but complicates it by the use of fragmentation, irregularity and the principle and imagery of hybridity. Neither equality nor inequality, neither center nor periphery are presented as clear positive or negative oppositions. on the one hand, by rejecting his parents' cultural and traditional ethnic (Jewish) values, and by accepting the american popular culture values of mass society at the beginning and, on the other hand, through his writing denying the stereotypical clichéd narrative patterns as well as through his status of a rebel against american cultural values later, Willy becomes a symbolically hybrid and ethnically, socially, emotionally and artistically unequal character. By unequal i mean his inequality related to the central and dominant culture and his social position. Willy is thus not depicted only as a rebel against social and cultural norms and traditions, but rather as a symbolical searcher for meaning, existence, social position and his place in the world oscillating between dominant and marginal positions, which enables him to acquire the status of symbolic hybridity that relativizes the clarity of binary oppositions. This also manifests itself in auster's depiction of Willy's writing. Willy's fragmentary, unfinished, lyrical and stylistically hybrid writing may symbolically suggest a postmodern alternative to commercially successful popular and traditional realistic writing, because that does not offer the pluralistic vision of the world Willy presents through his own writing and vision of the world. auster's depiction of displacement, periphery and inequality, however, is not meant to become a simplistic social criticism as is known from traditional social novels, but it acquires a positive meaning as the expression of cultural resistance to the norm, that is to the culture of commercialism and emotional shallowness Willy, however, has become a part of it by watching TV and identifying with the clichéd image of santa claus familiar from popular TV shows. This only confirms his ambiguity and hybrid status offering a pluralistic and relativizing vision of the world.

The same principles apply to Mr. Bones. his outcast position or status is also a position of inequality systematically built by auster to point out not only a symbolic inequality as the negative aspect of seemingly democratic society, but also as an inequality associated with different kinds of writing and visions of the world. Willy's dog, Mr. Bones, is not a pure breed, and the narrator comments that:

if Mr. Bones had belonged to some recognizable breed, he might have stood a chance in the daily beauty contests for prospective owners, but Willy's sidekick was a hodgepodge of genetic strains--part collie, part labrador, part spaniel, part canine puzzle--and to make matters worse, there were burrs protruding from his ragged coat, bad smells emanating from his mouth, and a perpetual bloodshot sadness lurking in his eyes [...] unless Mr. Bones found another master in one quick hurry, he was a pooch primed for oblivion. (auster 1999: 5)

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old age, a shabby appearance and mixed breed status all qualify Mr. Bones as both an outcast and an unequal animal within the animal kingdom. This position is further supported by his fabricated, fantastic skills. in this sense, he is disqualified from the animal kingdom since he can think, dream, partly understand human language and &quot;had thoroughly mastered the ins and outs of its syntax and grammar&quot; (auster 1999: 6); he is able to think and has a soul, which are human rather than animal qualities. in addition, inequality imagery and principles manifest themselves in auster's depiction of his treatment by different people. despite being nicely treated by a chinese-american boy, and especially by the Jones family, he is treated as an animal, a dog that must be mostly tied on a leash, which implies his inferior and unequal position, but not only in relation to the human race now. auster's systematic use of the imagery of the center and the margin further extended to the imagery of equality and inequality indicates one of the most important ideas expressed in the book, that is of freedom and liberty, which further evoke other connotations. Both Willy's and Mr. Bones' status, but especially their travels, indicate their metaphorical search not only for their ethnic, racial or emotional identity, but also for equality, freedom and tolerance. This search is also reminiscent of freudian desire and wish fulfillment. in sigmund freud's view, The dream is not comparable to the irregular sounds of a musical instrument, which, instead of being played by the hand of a musician, is struck by some external force; the dream is not meaningless, not absurd, does not presuppose that one part of our store of ideas is dormant while another part begins to awake. it is a perfectly valid psychic phenomenon, actually a wish-fulfilment; it may be enrolled in the continuity of the intelligible psychic activities of the waking state; it is built up by a highly complicated intellectual activity (freud). from this perspective, the relationship between Willy and Mr. Bones is the manifestation of an ideal condition and wish fulfillment on two ontological levels at least-- in a physical, experiential reality and on the fantastic, imaginary level

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as represented especially by the imaginary land of Timbuktu. The relationship between Willy and Mr. Bones represents the relationship between two poles, between reality and dream, between the physical and the spiritual. These two poles complement each other and are transformed into a final spiritual unity in Timbuktu. during his life, Willy provides Mr. Bones with the feeling of equality, freedom and tolerance, that is the qualities that he cannot acquire in his relationship with the majority of other people. as the narrator argues, &quot;...in Mr. Bones's case there was the advantage of being blessed with a master who did not treat him as inferior...Mr. Bones was not just Willy's best friend but his only friend&quot; (auster 1999: 6). Mr. Bones also provides Willy with fidelity, emotionality and tolerance, especially by becoming his reader and interpreter in the role of listener to his works, which ironically elevates Willy to the position of a recognized and acclaimed author. as the narrator says, &quot;from Willy, Mr. Bones learned about humor, irony, and metaphorical abundance&quot; (auster 1999: 31). Mr. Bones is thus not only a listener, but also a parodic interpreter of Willy's works. since in physical reality the situation is different (Willy is neither a popular nor an acclaimed writer), a desire for freedom, liberty and equality that cannot be accomplished in real life after Willy's death can be realized only symbolically in the imaginary land of Timbuktu, representing an ideal state, freedom, tolerance and humanity. here Timbuktu, an african city known as a cultural and educational center, but also a city seen from the european (american) perspective as a distant place, functions as a mythical land in at least two ways -- from a religious perspective, as a place of rest for souls, representing a continuation of life in the spiritual form; and as a place of tolerance, freedom and harmony. in addition, the depiction of Timbuktu evokes several other connotations. it is presented especially as a place where &quot;people went after they died. once your soul had been separated from your body, your body was buried in the ground and your soul lit out for the next world [...] it was located in the middle of a desert somewhere&quot; (auster 1999: 48). as the narrator continues, it was &quot;an `oasis of spirits'[...] in order to get there, you apparently had to walk across an immense kingdom of sand and heat, a realm of eternal nothingness&quot; (auster 1999: 48). however physically and geographically unclear and ambiguous the place might seem, its symbolic meaning is quite evident -- Timbuktu becomes a place of pure spirituality, harmony, tolerance, freedom, but especially of equality. Mr. Bones' anthropomorphic name, identity and wish acquire literal fulfillment here since &quot;in Timbuktu dogs would be able to speak man's language and converse with him as equal&quot; (auster 1999: 49). Timbuktu thus becomes a symbolic representation of wish fulfillment, a pure ideal state representing an ideal condition and, at the same time, it becomes a symbolic appreciation of spirituality and imagination. Timbuktu, which is the final destination of both Willy's and Mr. Bones' journeys, along with their search for identity, creates a central metaphor and a final unity between the physical and the spiritual, central and the peripheral, equal and unequal that all merge into the sphere of the spiritual. spirituality as represented by Timbuktu in the novel is connected with spirituality as a positive value associated with goodness, creative imagination, tolerance, freedom and purity.

3. AMERiCAN REAlitY ­ AMERiCAN dREAM ANd CoNSUMERiSM

simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory-- precession of simulacra-- it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. (Baudrillard 1988) Baudrillard further differentiates between representation and simulation: all of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange ­ God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference

Nau k a o k n j i z e v n o s t i

on the basic narrative level auster plays with the real and the imaginary (as represented by Mr. Bones' dreams) to emphasize the function of fantasy, and especially dreams. dreams in this novel represent memories of the past and indicate future action. Mr. Bones' dreams especially not only vivify both Willy's and Willy parents' childhood, european and later american past, but also imply Willy's future death, which actually happens as can be seen from Mr. Bones' dream: &quot;That was when he dreamed the dream in which he saw Willy die. it began with the two of them waking up, opening their eyes and emerging from the sleep they had just fallen into ­ which was the sleep they were in now, the same one in which Mr. Bones was dreaming the dream (auster 1999: 64).&quot; everything which is associated with the physical, biological and empirical acquires negative status in auster's novel while, on the other hand, the author seems to understand the imaginary and the fantastic as positive elements. as mentioned above, the imaginary and the fantastic can be understood as positive in two ways: as an appreciation of creativity and imagination as opposed to the physical, materialist and consumerist; and as an imaginary realization of what cannot be realized in real life. on the other hand, in auster's novel the imaginary and the fantastic symbolically evoke the idea of fabrication, that is an artificial creation of reality. in this sense then, the idea of artificial construction of reality is closely connected with the idea of artificial simulation of reality in Jean Baudrillard's understanding, which further evokes negative connotations. By artificial i mean the way characters in the novel perceive reality created by different media, that is reality which is not perceived directly through the individual's contact with nature (reality), but reality which is mediated through different media. in his Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard points out the nature of simulation in technically advanced societies. in his view,

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or circumference[...] so it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). conversely, simulation starts from the utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum. (Baudrillard 1988)

auster's depiction of the power of television points out how the mass media influence contemporary culture. This power manifests especially in Willy's understanding of reality in this novel. Willy adopts another name, christmas, because he is influenced by his vision of santa claus on TV, which contributes to his decision to become a prophetic, charitable, good and different person. The narrator suggests that, &quot;he knew the difference between reality and make-believe, and if santa claus was talking to him from his mother's television set, that could only mean he was a lot of drunker than he supposed&quot; (auster 1999: 18). But, as the narrator further continues, &quot;santa claus [...] had sprung forth from the depths of Television land to debunk the certitudes of Willy's skepticism and put his soul back together again [...] christmas was real, he learned, and there would be not truth or happiness for him until he began to embrace its spirit&quot; (auster 1999: 21). Willy's vision of reality thus seems to be based on the media image of reality that precedes this vision and influences his decision to become a good person. Willy, however, cannot realize the commercial function of the TV program in which the complexity of christmas is flattened and becomes only a parodic &quot;reformed&quot; christian modeled after TV shows and traveling preachers. at the same time, these extracts speak of the transition that Willy's understanding of reality is undergoing. The first extract shows Willy as a rational character able to distinguish between the actual physical world and the world mediated through television. The second extract, however, portrays Willy as a character whose vision is manipulated not only by his alcoholic addiction, but especially by television, which simulates and manipulates reality and blurs the distinction between the real, physical, experiential and the televisual, imaginary and fantastic worlds. Willy lacks a key to the code that would enable him to distinguish between the real and the physical. his aims, attitudes and behavior are modeled after meta-realities (television, dreams, visions) representing different ontological systems. in addition to this, the narrator explains about Willy, &quot;That would be his mission in life from now on: to embody the message of christmas every day of the year, to ask nothing from the world and give it only love in return. in other words, Willy decided to turn himself into a saint&quot; (auster 1999: 21). This passage not only speaks of auster's critique of televisual simulation and manipulation but it also parodies and criticizes popular culture and stereotypical characters from the TV programs (television preachers, religious programs, reformed alcoholics and drug addicts) as produced by mass media, especially by television. Willy's decision to become almost a saint is thus stimulated by the image

of the whole series of stereotypical transformed and cured alcoholics, drug addicts (transformed into religious and christian persons), and popular TV preachers as presented in the mass media the victim of which he becomes. analyzing auster's novel Timbuktu and the role and power of media and consumerism in this novel, purnur Üçar argues that

a consumer is manipulated to formulate an identity within the framework that is presented to him/her through the producers [...] religion for auster represents another product that one can purchase [...] Belief, just like reality, can be selected from the things presented to us. selecting a belief and living by it is only a way of creating another simulacrum within the simulacrum. in other words, through belief the consumer is pulled deeper into the simulacrum by the producers. (Üçar 2001)

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as can be seen from Üçar's statement, Willy becomes a typical consumerist character influenced by the power of the media, popular culture and popular beliefs that construct his consumer identity and vision of the world. in Üçar's view, &quot;Willy creates the meaning and aim in his life through his TV vision [...] Willy's simulated identity is not his own choice but is only a sample from the various identities presented to him by the producers of the simulacrum of TV. The TV vision Willy had seen becomes Willy himself&quot; (uçar 2001). a similar vision of reality, influenced by dreams and the dog's ironic anthropomorphic status, applies to Mr. Bones. uçar argues that &quot;Mr. Bones [...] does not distinguish between a vision and being awake&quot; (uçar 2001). auster further complicates the meaning of his use of imagery of equality and artificiality. on the one hand, equality related to different versions of reality (physical and mediated through media and popular culture) implies his critique of consumer and clichéd popular culture. on the other hand, on the structural and narrative level, his blurring of the boundaries between the physical and the imaginary, between reality and dream, televisual and experiential reality suggests the principle of symbolic equality, anequality between the real and the imaginary, physical and simulated, and between narrative and televisual versions of reality. None of these realities is thus depicted as privileged, dominant, superior or inferior, but all are presented as equal and it is up to the reader to choose the most convincing of them. The principle of equality as a positive principle and image applies to different kinds of writing and cultures as well. No writing and culture is privileged in auster's novel but all are united under the central metaphor of Timbuktu, representing spirituality, imagination, creativity, equality and freedom. in addition to this, auster re-writes the traditional meaning of the american dream. The american dream represents an important aspect of american cultural tradition associated with the idea of unlimited opportunities, freedom, commercial and personal success. in auster's novel, however, the author rather shows the impossibility of the american dream. Willy, his parents, and Mr. Bones are losers rather than winners, characters unfit for the dominant social structures, who are manipulated by a vision of the american dream and its popular version in the media, but who are also unable to achieve it during their life. The imaginary land of Timbuktu thus indicates the symbolic meaning of the american dream only

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as an imaginary construct that can be achieved only in the land of imagination and idealization, which becomes a utopian project creating a myth rather than reality. from the freudian perspective the symbolic meaning of Timbuktu thus indicates a fulfillment of an unfulfilled desire projected into a dream and fantasy understood as real. Then what seems to be real seen from the freudian perspective is a symbolic projection of desire rather than a verifiable reality. in other words, in real life equality, liberty and success become illusory and they acquire the status of unfulfilled desires. in other words, this unfulfilled desire implies a critique of the concept of the american dream as unrealizable for most people.

N a u k a

in his novel Timbuktu, using the imagery especially of the center and the periphery developed into the imagery of the equality and inequality, auster transforms and undermines the original meaning of the idea of the american dream. he also gives a playful and parodic picture of the contemporary cultural condition. his depiction of different ontological levels (physical reality, television meta-reality, dreams, visions, and fantasy) enables him to blur the distinction between the real and the imaginary and thus to create the effect and imagery of equality. his depiction of characters, especially of Willy and Mr. Bones influenced by popular culture, media (Willy) and dreams (Mr. Bones), is a symbolic expression of the contemporary cultural condition which auster intends to criticize. seen in the context of Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulation and simulacra, and developing the imagery of equality and inequality, auster points out the manipulation by television, media and popular culture of the individual's perception of the world. all &quot;realities&quot;, on the one hand, become equally significant and important but, on the other hand, having the power of real physical reality, a &quot;reality&quot; mediated through television manipulates characters' perception and vision of the world by giving them a simplistic, artificial and reduced image of reality. at the same time, imagination, fantasy and the imaginary land of Timbuktu form a metaphor of unfulfilled desire associated with life in the usa and with the idea of the american dream. The ontological level of the physical, empirical and verifiable acquires negative attributes and is associated with failure and unhappiness. on the other hand, the imaginary and fantastic as represented by dreams and the imaginary land of Timbuktu imply positive connotations and are associated rather with equality and freedom. The symbolic meaning of Timbuktu also represents freudian wish fulfillment, that is the transformation of unfulfilled desires (in real, physical reality) into an &quot;imaginary&quot; realization of reality. at the same time, this narrative strategy implies failure of the american dream in physical reality, which, since it can be symbolically fulfilled only as a wish, imagination and dream, represents only a utopian project and myth rather than reality. however, the positive connotations associated with the spiritual, imaginary and fantastic represent auster's appreciation of the imagination, spirituality, and the process of story telling and writing.

SU M M A RY c e N T e r-pe r i ph e ry, e Qua l i T y-i N e Qua l i T y, a M e r ic a N dr e a M a N d c oNsu M e r isM i N pau l aus T e r' s T I M BU K T U (19 9 9) although in his novel Timbuktu auster seems to use rather traditional narrative techniques, the narrative from the point of view of a dog represents a fantastic element that evokes doubts about the authenticity of the image of reality mediated through this character. auster's construction of the narrative in this novel is reminiscent of the fairy tale, which requires a sensibility that undermines belief in the mimetic representation of reality. My paper analyzes auster's construction of reality, his use of fantastic and metafictional elements and the way metafictional narrative techniques, imagination, fantasy and storytelling create an alternative space to the rational and consumerist approach to the world which the characters in the novel are influenced by. This article also deals with auster's symbolic treatment of the failure of the american dream as symbolically expressed through his depiction of the relationships between the center and periphery. dealing with paul auster's fiction, many critics emphasize the postmodern character of his work, but not so many of them have commented on his depiction of marginal characters and their symbolic connection to the idea of the american dream.1 i will not, therefore, focus on analysis of the manifestation of postmodernism in this novel. in this paper i will focus on auster's use of the imagery of the center and the periphery, equality and inequality, and the way he uses them to show the inadequacy of one of the most important myths related to american cultural identity-- the american dream. further, i will explore auster's depiction of the nature of the postmodern cultural condition influenced by media, popular culture and consumerism. KEYWORDS: postmodern fiction, center, periphery, consumerism, parody, irony, writing, fantasy, imagination, media.

udc 821.42/45.09-32 el alami J.

Cherki Karkaba Sultan Moulay Slimane University, Morocco

of The WesT iN el alaMy's U N M A ROCA I N à N EW YOR K

sTereoTypes

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in his dealing with edward said's Orientalism, John Mcleod (Mcleod 2000: 44-46) highlights a number of major stereotypes of the orient in the discourse of orientalism. These stereotypes can be listed as follows: 1- The orient is primitive, backward and changeless. 2- The orient is associated with strangeness and eccentricity. 3- The discourse of orientalism is built around a number of racial stereotypes. 4- Gender-based stereotypes: a- The orient is feminine. b- The oriental male is effeminate. c- The oriental female is closely linked to exotic eroticism. d- The orient is connected with moral degeneracy. it is interesting to read Western literature and see how the orient is represented and how the orientalist discourse implements these stereotypes. This has largely been done within the context of postcolonial criticism. however, it remains to be seen whether the oriental perception of the West proceeds in the same way, constructing a discourse centred on stereotypes about the West. is it legitimate to assume that orientalism has a counterpart, occidentalism, a discourse built around a set of anti-Western thoughts? probing into the logic governing occidentalism could be the best way to understand the mechanism of the orientalist discourse. With this in mind, we can read a novel written a couple of years before the september attack on the twin towers in New york by a Moroccan university lecturer who devotes his Un Marocain à New York to the perception of the great occidental city through the oriental eyes of a Moroccan young man spending some time as a student in the city of mighty skyscrapers. This article will proceed following one by one the four major stereotypes listed above. 1 . P R i M i t i v E , b A C k wA R d A N d C h A N G E l E S S oR i E N t/ PR i M i t i v E o C C i dE N t in orientalism as a Western system of thought, the orient is associated with backwardness, a backwardness made perennial by an aversion to change or progress. edward said asserts that &quot;orientalism assumed an unchanging orient,

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absolutely different (...) from the West&quot; (2003, 1978: 96). if the West is the place of progress and scientific development, the discourse of orientalism portrays the orient as a static and changeless space. a Westerner travelling to oriental lands was not just moving in space from one location to the other; potentially they were also travelling back in time to an earlier world. (Mcleod 2000: 44)

John Mcloed's statement could be applied following a process of reversal focusing more on the perception of the West through the gaze of an oriental subject. in youssef elalamy's novel, the oriental subject travels to Western lands. The hero of this postmodern jumble of disconnected stories, a Moroccan student, moves in the highly developed space of New york, and as he walks about from one place to another, he seems to be travelling ahead in time to a more developed world, a world infinitely greater than his third-world Morocco. New york, with its high-rise buildings, namely the World Trade centre, the symbol of Western scientific development and technological progress, is, under the oriental gaze of elalamy's protagonist, infinitely fascinating, greater than he could ever imagine. &quot;cette ville où tout est plus fascinant, plus impressionnant, plut haut, plus grand, infiniment plus grand.&quot; (elalamy 1998 : 29).1 New york symbolises the incommensurable fascination the Moroccan subject has for Western culture and civilisation. Un Marocain à New York reflects Moroccans' powerful attraction the West, as the following quotation may suggest, if we admit that the narrator could be viewed as representing the millions of young Moroccans who dream about migrating to Western cities. cela faisait plus de vingt ans que je vivais dans cette attente. plus exactement, depuis le jour où je reçus des mains de ma maîtresse d'école la photo d'une femme géante, une torche à la main, avec cette légende : La liberté éclairant le monde. (...) debout à l'arrière du bateau, je quittais la ville à reculons (...) debout sur la pointe des pieds, les gratte-ciel nous épiaient de leur oeil de verre, tandis que nous nous éloignions du rivage. (elalamy 1998 : 19) This fascination for the West is mingled with the awareness of belonging to a less developed world. The discourse of said's orientalism, which highlights the West's perception of the other cultures as inferior, also accommodates the inferiority awareness in the mind of the non-western subject. Un Marocain à New York is an ambivalent textual construct and, therefore, follows the principle according to which &quot;texts rarely embody just one view&quot; (Mcleod 2000: 51). While denouncing with edward said the way in which the orientalist discourse deploys a number of stereotypes reducing the non-western world to a static vision, a vision blurred in a web of negative connotations, we cannot remain indifferent to the way stereotypes are implemented in this novel to function contrariwise, depicting an ambivalent perception of the West. While advancing ahead in time on the civilised realm of New york, the oriental subject, the hero of

this novel, seems to be standing rooted to the spot, balancing on one foot, in the vertigo of cultural shock. The Moroccan student, paradoxically, feels at home in New york as landscapes of poverty and homelessness appear in his field of vision. he feels at home when he perceives familiar sights of beggars and homeless people in the busy streets of New york.

This perception of New york, as a place of violence, poverty and deprivation, offers a vision which questions the stereotype of the West as paradise, a stereotype that continues to stick in the minds of millions of potential migrants. in this vision, the otherness of the West is suddenly reversed into sameness, offering backwardness as a common feature uniting two seemingly irreconcilable third and first worlds. Un Marocain à New York therefore deconstructs the West as a space of ambivalence where stereotypes can function contrariwise. The stereotype of the western colonial travellers moving from one oriental land to another, with the feeling that they were voyaging back in time to an earlier epoch of human history, is used in this book in a contrapuntal way. as the Moroccan student advances on the civilised territory of New york, his movement in space is described as a journey back to the primitive times of prehistory. as he enters a nightclub, he seems to be stepping into a cavern inhabited by strange members of a primitive horde, with the insinuation that americans are primitive, uncivilised and, above all, strange. après avoir longuement hésité, je tombai enfin sur ce qui ressemblait à l'entrée d'une discothèque et, tout en suivant les instructions sur la porte, je sonnai une fois, deux fois, puis trois fois. au bout d'une minute, un homme

strangeness is a crucial stereotype associated with the orient in the discourse of orientalism. in this discourse, the oriental subject is portrayed as a weird figure whose difference as other is odd or bizarre. Western writers and artists were eager to depict the assumed eccentricity of oriental people. Needless to assert that the eccentricity of the oriental figure is part and parcel of the implication of the &quot;orient as insinuating danger&quot; (said 1978: 57). a strange arab, for example, constitutes a potential danger in the perception of the western gaze. in Un Marocain à New York, the hero probably adopts the same attitude as the western travellers of the colonial period. he may be considered as attempting to construct the otherness of the americans as basically eccentric and strange. Most of the people he meets seem to be different from and strange compared with what might be deemed as the average citizens of the usa. The strange aggressive-looking people he meets in one of the night clubs cannot be viewed as typical american subjects. With their tattoos, long hair, parched jeans and leather boots, they are depicted as primitive, rough-mannered, and, implicitly compared to wild animals. assis à mes côtés, skull, tête-de-mort, (c'est ainsi qu'il se faisait appeler par les intimes), abritait dans son regard tous les germes actifs de la violence urbaine. son visage d'ange unissait sous ses traits une noble moustache arabe et des yeux de vampire assoiffé de sang. comme tous ses copains, skull avait de longs cheveux raides qui lui tombait sur les épaules, un jean entièrement rapiécé, un ceinturon clouté, un blouson usé et une paire de bottes en cuir. (...) skull me saouhaitait la bienvenüe dans le langage de sa tribu. (...) Je remarquais à present cet anneau d'acier qui lui cernait le pouce. sur l'anneau, une tête de loup, la gueule béante, les crocs saillants et l'air menaçant. (elalamy 1998: 40) Their strangeness is symbolised by the head of a wolf on the steel ring around skull's thumb. skull is the nickname of the head of the gang in the night club which is compared to a primitive cavern. in the middle of this hostile jungle, the hero considers himself as a lamb in the company of wolves &quot;tel un agneau dans une compagnie de loups&quot; (elalamy 1998: 39). With its open menacing jaws, the head of the wolf might be interpreted as symbolising the potential aggressive

instinct inhabiting the civilised american self. such an interpretation fits in well in the process of constructing the stereotype of the West as harbouring potential violence behind the façade of civilisation. in short, the stereotype of the orient as being uncivilised, strange and potentially dangerous is reversed in the project of constructing the otherness of the West, symbolised by New york, the place of violence par excellence, a city which reeks of aggressiveness due to the high rate of suicides, mugging, burglary, rape and murder. un suicide et une overdose toutes les sept heures, deux viols et un meurtre toutes les cinq heures, seize cambriolages et seize aggressions toutes les heures, un hold-up tous les quarts d'heures, un vol toutes les trois minutes, une urgence toutes les secondes. (elalamy 1998: 36)

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although essential in the construction of the stereotype of New york as a violent metropolis, the figures of violence listed during a news television broadcast are comparatively normal, if the impressive number of its inhabitants is taken into consideration. 3. R AC i A l St E R E ot Y PE S

if orientalism is for said &quot;a system of representations&quot; (said 1978, 2003: 202) enacting a number of stereotypes about the orient, occidentalism, by virtue of a mechanism of reversal, would be a discourse that implements stereotypes about the West with the aim of counterattacking western assumptions about nonwesterners. if orientalism &quot;is a school of interpretation whose material happens to be the orient, its civilizations, peoples and localities&quot; (said 1978, 2003: 203), then occidentalism would be an interpretative system, a body of representations enacting stereotypes of the West. in Un Marocain à New York, the author touches on a number of stereotypes about the americans and their Western civilisation. although he uses humour, irony and an extremely playful style of narration to mark his distance, elalamy ambivalently participates in the construction of Western otherness by playing with racial stereotypes about the americans. While doing so, he, paradoxically, seems to be showing that any stereotype is basically ridiculous or laughable. The author's ironic playful style toys with the stereotype of the american as fast-food eater. he coins the phrase homo hamburgerus to refer to the modern westernised man. after comparing the night-club, with its strange customers, to a prehistoric cavern, now the author, once again, alludes to the animality inherent to modern westernised man. &quot;après l'âge de la pierre et l'âge du bronze, nous voilà passés à l'âge du hamburger.&quot; (elalamy 1998: 69) The humorous phrase homo hamburgerus, quite in the same way as the terms orientalism and occidentalism, is a fabricated construct made up of a series of connotations built around images evoking racial stereotypes. Homo evokes homo sapiens which connotes the idea of being primitive, the contrary of civilised. The word hamburger alludes to the stereotype of obesity and reinforces the connotation

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4.

of animality. The metaphoric allusion to animality is built around the idea of obesity and incessant eating or continuous chewing, which brings the fast-food eater closer to ruminants. The same connotation is suggested in the chapter entitled &quot;internet chewing-gum&quot; in spite of all the distance that the author marks with his sarcasm and biting irony.2 The chapter starts with a striking insinuation &quot;une vache qui rumine est une vache heureuse&quot;, a cow is happy when chewing, which rises as a conclusive remark following his observation that the chewing-gum is widely used in america. &quot;ici tout le monde en mâche, du chewing-gum&quot; (elalamy 1998: 111). The ironic style which is meant to distance the narrator from the generalising assumption that americans love chewing-gum, may have, in fact, the contrary effect, that of contributing to construct a racial stereotype. &quot;s'abstenir de mâcher, c'est trahir la Nation.&quot; (elalamy 1998: 111) abstinence from chewing is betrayal for the nation. in this statement, the implied insinuation is closely related to the allusion to chewing and ruminating, indirectly comparing americans to ruminants. The allusion to animals is also implemented in &quot;une vie de chien&quot;, a chapter which draws on another stereotype about the west, that of being fond of pets, particularly dogs, perhaps a western cultural feature that orientals fail to understand. The narrator of elalamy's novel betrays his astonishment at this phenomenon and indirectly voices his criticism through his sarcastic depiction of how dogs can be overspoilt in the west while thousands of people in the third world die of starvation (elalamy 1998: 75). The author's biting criticism of the american way of life can be disclosed in the ironic title &quot;une vie de chien&quot; which might be interpreted as equating americans to dogs. GE N dE R-bASE d St E R Eot Y PE S

More striking and complex than stereotypes involving animal tropes are gender-based prejudices. The orient is depicted as feminine in the orientalist discourse, while the West is represented as masculine. The orient is gendered into being feminine, which means passive, and therefore submissive. The orient lures and tempts the Western coloniser who is represented as a masculine, active and dominant figure. The orient is rendered as a virgin territory, an exotic and sexually mysterious object of temptation for the western explorer. a specific sexual vocabulary is thus deployed in the orientalist discourse to describe the encounter between the east and the West. The orient is portrayed in terms of being &quot;penetrated,&quot; &quot;embraced,&quot; or &quot;ravished&quot; by the masculine Western adventurer. (Mcleod 2000: 45)3 in Un Marocain à New York the author reverses the stereotypes based on gender differences and, therefore, shatters the logic governing the discourse of orientalism where the West is represented as masculine. in the opening chapter &quot;féminin masculin&quot; the narrator evokes his child's vision of the world being divided into two distinct halves: one masculine, while the other half is feminine. in this child's vision, Morocco is erected as virile while other countries are thought of as feminine. standing on the 110th floor of the World Trade center,

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the Moroccan student seems to be obsessed by the idea of knowing about the sex of New york. &quot;... du haut du 110è étage du World Trade center, je n'ai qu'une obsession, connaître le sexe de cette ville.&quot; (elalamy 1998: 12). The narrator's perception of New york, that mighty symbol of Western &quot;virility&quot;, is that of a feminine city. What is ironic is that the narrator questions the sex of New york while standing on one of the highest floors of the Twin Towers which rise erect as a phallic symbol. The narrator's attitude is reminiscent of the colonial traveller's vision of the oriental lands, a vision in which the orient is feminised. in the narrator's sexist gaze, New york is equated with a fascinating, erotically tempting woman, a woman who might seem, at first, to be frigid, but one who could turn out to be a sexually demanding lover.

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New york est une ville d'apparence frigide, mais d'apparence seulement. car si l'on y pénètre parfois sur la pointe des pieds, si l'on s'y introduit souvent avec méfiance, on en resort toujours étourdi, paumé, obsédé, transformé. New york est une ville fascinante, séduisante et profondément éprouvante. (elalamy 1998: 12) Quite in the same way as in orientalist representations, the author implements a number of words and phrases with specifically sexual connotations: &quot;pénètre&quot;, &quot;on s'y introduit,&quot; &quot;à croquer,&quot; &quot;le va-et-vient.&quot; The sexual overtone is reinforced by the author's insistence on the reference to New york as Big apple; the apple being a symbol of irresistible desire. au risque d'y laisser ses dents, Big apple, la grosse pomme, comme on la surname ici, est à croquer. Quelques pas dans la ville et l'on est pris dans le tumulte de la rue, le va-et-vient incessant de la foule, comme dans les bras d'une femme infidèle que l'on sait vicieuse, fatale, mais don't on ne peut plus sepasser. (elalamy 1998: 12) like the orient in Western fantasies, New york is, for the narrator of this Moroccan novel, &quot;a site of perverse desire.&quot; (Mcleod 2000: 46) This assumption can be corroborated by the comparison of New york with the image of an irresistible, perverse unfaithful woman. The perception of New york's &quot;feminine penetrability,&quot; to put it in said's terms (said 1978: 206),4 and the implication of this highly symbolic Western city as a place of &quot;moral degeneracy,&quot;5 as suggested in other chapters, reveals the author's conscious or unconscious attempt to reverse oriental stereotypes into negative generalisations about the West. 5. CoNClUSioN

The major concern of this article revolves round the ambivalence and complexity of cross-cultural perception. The protagonist's ambivalent perception is that of admiration and rejection. The striking use of humour, irony, mockery, derision and sarcasm is a stylistic skill to mark a distance between the gazer

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REFERENCES

and the object of perception. irony and derision are also used as sharp weapons for satire and criticism. The author's irony and his sarcastic mockery reveal his high intellectual westernised perception, a perception which paradoxically welds together criticism and admiration. his gaze is that of the westernised intellectual who has a thorough knowledge of the West and western values, but, his narrative ambivalently offers a perception through which the West is represented as being degenerate and probably declining. The language and style of narration function ambivalently, breaking the logic governing stereotypes of New york, while contributing to the construction of the West's otherness. The incoherent form of the novel, with its post-modern fragmentary narrative structure, reflects the incoherence and fragmentation of human perception. The perception of the other is fragmentary because the object of the gaze is often beyond reach. The perception of the West in this Moroccan novel is that of a young man in whose gaze things take different shapes from what can be perceived by, let us say, a middle-aged Moroccan father, staying with his family at his american friends' house.

This article focuses on cross-cultural perception involving the orient and the occident. it attempts to demonstrate how cultural stereotypes are absurd, dwelling on the way the orientalist discourse implements a number of stereotypes about the orient. The article goes on to show that the oriental perception of the West may proceed in the same way to construct a discourse elaborated round stereotypes about the West. Based on a reading of a novel by a Moroccan writer, the article raises the question whether it might be legitimate to assume that orientalism has a counterpart, occidentalism, a discourse steeped in anti-Western thoughts. KEYWORDS: orientalism, orient, occidentalism, West, oriental, Western, orientalist discourse, stereotypes, post colonialism, ambivalence, irony.

childhood narratives have been for decades an important source of interest in different academic disciplines. The exploration of identity development they often contain accounts for the appeal of this kind of fiction not only within literary studies but also within fields such as psychology and cultural studies. at the literary level, their frequent juxtaposition of realistic plots and symbolic elements has led to an awareness of common patterns in them which have attracted critical attention. indeed, in his 1984 seminal study on childhood autobiography richard N. coe argues that a significant number of these narratives present parallel preoccupations which take the form of recurrent themes and images often embodying symbolic truths (1984: 17). one of such themes is friendship, a concept which has been defined in scientific terms as &quot;an emotional relationship which includes elements of mutual trust, assistance, respect, understanding and intimacy&quot; (flanagan 1996: 123). Though not often given primary attention in critical approaches to childhood fiction, perhaps as a result of the central position ascribed to familial relationships and individual subjectivity, friendship stands as an important component in early identity development, as it has been proved by studies in the fields of psychology and pedagogy which contend that friends provide emotional support and facilitate not only emotional development but also the learning of empathy (flanagan 1996: 122). as cotterell argues, &quot;[t]ogether with family, friends are the primary bonding materials in the edifice we call community&quot; (cotterell 1996: 21). preadolescence same-sex friendship, in particular, has been highlighted as playing an essential role not only in the development of an individual's sensitivity to other people's needs, but also in future social adjustment (erwin 1998: 6). The significance of friendship in identity formation explains its frequent presence in literature and more specifically in childhood narratives, as it will be the case in the novels analysed in the following pages. it is my view that contemporary diasporic fiction focused on children represents an important contribution to the genre by adding a new dimension to the portrayal of childhood experience, since it incorporates issues of ethnic difference, home and belonging which were previously absent from it. as roger

eVil frieNds:

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Patricia Bastida-Rodriguez University of the Balearic Islands

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Bromley explains, narratives by writers from ethnic minorities portray characters &quot;for whom categories of belonging and the present have been made unstable as a consequence of the displacement enforced by post-colonial and/or migrant circumstances&quot; (2000: 1). Nowhere is this affirmation more apparent than in novels depicting the identity conflicts of young characters whose childhoods turn increasingly difficult due to their position as second-generation migrants and, therefore, to the &quot;in-between&quot; space they inhabit between their parents' original culture and Western society. Two authors who have tackled these childhood conflicts are British writers Meera syal and helen oyeyemi, whose first novels Anita and Me (1996) and The Icarus Girl (2005), respectively,2 offer an insightful exploration of problematic friendships which play a crucial role in leading the protagonists towards maturity.3 The diasporic nature of the focalising characters stands as a powerful link between both narratives which highlights the complexities surrounding the construction of identity in second-generation migrants. Thus, in both novels the protagonists turn to damaging friendships for support and approval in a society which marks them as ethnically different and alien to the nation. it is the aim of this essay to analyse the relevance of the friendship motif in the aforementioned narratives by syal and oyeyemi as well as the similarities in the way it is deployed in each of them in their exploration of identity conflicts in diasporic children. in order to do this, i will focus initially on the conflicts experienced by the protagonists as a result of their ethnic difference, which will allow the subsequent examination of the friendship that ensues and the assessment of its effects on their perception of themselves as diasporic individuals. despite several differences regarding tone and narrative strategies, both novels display numerous parallels among which we must highlight their semiautobiographical nature, since both deal with the experiences of a little girl who grows up in the author's ethnic community: indian-British in syal's Anita and Me, Nigerian-British in oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl. While syal's novel is narrated in the first person by nine-year-old Meena, who offers a humorous account of growing up in the 60s, eight-year-old Jessamy in The Icarus Girl is the one to focalise a third-person narration of a more sombre tone set in present-day london. The incorporation of the uncanny through the deployment of the Doppelgänger theme4 ­ a concept used in German folklore to refer to the ghostly double of a person whose sighting brings bad luck ­ accounts for the use of a different narratorial voice, since, as the author herself explains, a third-person narrator was necessary to make the story credible and prevent its being taken as the imaginative production of a troubled girl (forna 2006: 55). it is significant that both narratives begin with episodes revealing the protagonists' feelings of dislocation, thus offering an important clue as to the nature of their conflicts. if Meena resorts to inventing stories about herself in order to survive, as a way &quot;to feel complete, to belong&quot; (syal 1997: 10), for solitary Jessamy hiding for hours in a cupboard is, to her mother's concern, the most effective strategy to fight against her perception of a dislocated self: &quot;if she reminded herself that she was in the cupboard, she would know exactly where she was, something that was increasingly difficult each day&quot; (oyeyemi 2006: 3). hence in both

in common sense language, identification is constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group, or with an ideal, and with the natural closure of solidarity and allegiance established on this foundation. in contrast with the `naturalism' of this definition, the discursive approach sees identification as a construction, a process never completed ­ always `in process'. (hall 1997: 2) Within psychology identification in the peer group has been perceived as a significant need in adolescence which provides a social identity and an enhancement of the individual's self-concept (cotterell 1996: 13-14). This enhancement of self-perception can certainly be observed in Meena and Jessamy as they initiate friendships with blonde, rebellious anita and mysterious, Nigerian Tilly-Tilly, respectively.5 The fantasy of total identification with the new friend is emphasised in both narratives by numerous passages, such as that in which Meena can see in anita's eyes &quot;the recognition of a kindred spirit&quot;, reaching such a point of identification that she perceives in them her &quot;own questioning reflection&quot; (syal 1997: 150). for Meena, anita also becomes her &quot;passport to acceptance&quot; in society (syal 1997: 148) due to her european, and thus &quot;unmarked&quot;, ethnic origin, which once again highlights the relevance of ethnicity in the development of her identity. indeed, in syal's novel friendship with anita runs parallel to the protagonist's rejection of her own ethnic background, culminating in the total disidentification with her own image in the mirror6 and the appearance of a split

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characters their diasporic condition seems to lie at the heart of their conflicts, as we can observe in the repeated allusion to issues of location and belonging. as Kalra, Kaur and hutnyk suggest, diasporic individuals are carriers of a consciousness which provides an awareness of difference, most frequently of a racial or ethnic nature, and this stands as a basic aspect in their identity which usually emerges against a dominant cultural force challenging their self-perception (2005: 30). for both Meena and Jessamy, their different ethnic origin is constantly reminded in their everyday lives in Britain, since they often have to face racist abuse from their peers eventually leading to aggressive reactions and parental reproof. identity conflicts are depicted more acutely in The Icarus Girl as a result of Jessamy's introverted personality ­ in contrast with Meena's spontaneity ­ and her ambiguous position as a &quot;half-and-half&quot; child (oyeyemi 2006: 13), the mixedraced daughter of an english father and a Nigerian mother. indeed, Jessamy's split identity as a result of her bicultural origin is often evoked in the novel, as in the episode when she reflects on her Nigerian name, Wuraola, meaning &quot;gold&quot; in yoruba: &quot;Wuraola sounded like another person. Not her at all. should she answer to this name, and by doing so steal the identity of someone who belonged here? should she . . . become Wuraola? But how?&quot; (oyeyemi 2006: 20). for both protagonists, having a friend beyond the family not only marks a departure from the limited environment of early childhood: it also materialises their desire for an equal to identify with. as stuart hall argues, the concept of identification is intimately intertwined with that of identity, although he warns against its frequent over-simplification as a process that can ever achieve completeness:

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identity, since she perceives herself as &quot;a freak of some kind, too mouthy, clumsy and scabby to be a real indian girl, too indian to be a real Tollington wench&quot; (syal 1997: 149-150). in The Icarus Girl Jessamy's confusion about her bicultural origin, present at different stages during the narrative, takes the form of resentment towards her mother for the hybrid identity she has imposed on her, as she confides to an understanding psychologist: `sometimes i feel like she wants me to . . . i don't know. she wants me to be Nigerian or something. and i don't want to be changed that way; i can't be. it might hurt.' `hurt?' said dr McKenzie. `yeah, like . . . being stretched.' (oyeyemi 2006: 257)

an interesting disparity between both narratives lies in the different relevance attributed to gender issues. While in Anita and Me gender plays a crucial role in Meena's identification with anita, since the latter embodies the protagonist's ideal of femininity as she approaches puberty and her sexuality awakens, gender issues in The Icarus Girl never appear in such an explicit way. This can be interpreted as a consequence of the early age of the protagonist, which places her at an earlier stage in the development of her identity and, thus, at a phase in her life in which gender awareness is still not problematic. in both novels the new friend's unruly, defiant behaviour becomes a model to be admired and imitated by the protagonist as a materialisation of the confidence she lacks, eventually provoking her challenge of familial and social rules and, therefore, growing tensions in her family. from a psychological perspective the influence of friends in childhood and adolescence is connected to a gradual loss of intimacy with parents which may lead to conflicts within the family, although this influence must also be acknowledged as a source of social support (erwin 1998: 8). in the novels analysed, the support offered by anita and Tilly-Tilly brings about a transformation in the protagonists towards a more confident attitude which will prove valuable in her process of maturation, as Jessamy herself realises: &quot;ever since she had come back from Nigeria, [Jessamy] felt as if she was becoming different, becoming stronger, becoming more like Tilly&quot; (oyeyemi 2006: 151). as already stated, the cruel, remorseless behaviour of the new friend, whose favourite hobby is to humiliate others, encourages the same pattern of conduct in the protagonists, producing not only disappointment within their families but also increasing trouble in their everyday lives. as the narratives advance, different episodes evince a growing anguish in both Meena and Jessamy as remorse and fear, both of their parents' punishments and of their friends' capacity for evil, begin to shake their consciences. Thus, the scene in which anita bullies her weak, introverted younger sister into showing her nakedness in front of everyone proves to Meena the extent of her friend's cruelty. in addition, the protagonist's initial admiration for anita soon gives way to sympathy at her dysfunctional family and bleak future, as well as to alarm as she suspects her involvement in racist attacks.7 a similar progression can be observed in The Icarus Girl, as Jessamy goes through her most terrifying experiences when she discovers her friend's

My best friend was sharing me with someone else and i knew whatever she had been giving me was only what she had left over from him, the scraps, the tokens, the lies. i had fought for this friendship, worried over it, made sacrifices for it, measured myself against it, lost myself inside it, had little to show for it but this bewildered sense of betrayal. Now i knew that i had

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frightening habit of taking revenge on those who have hurt her. Tilly's supernatural ability to control Jess's body becomes another source of terror, although realising her friend's desire to occupy her position eventually allows Jessamy to have a more positive perception of her mixed-race identity: &quot;Jess thought about it, then realised that she didn't [want to be like Tilly], really. and that she hadn't for some time. for a little while it had seemed to be ... oK just to be her, Jess&quot; (oyeyemi 2006: 218). This situation leads to a gradual misidentification in the protagonists which can be interpreted as part of a process towards a more mature stage in their lives. according to psychological studies of child development, children at this new stage seek deeper friendships based on &quot;reciprocal emotional commitment&quot;, where &quot;[f]riends act as confidants and therapists&quot; (flanagan 1996: 124).8 in the novels this process comes as a consequence of the protagonists' awareness of their own individuality and the impossibility of total identification with their chosen friends, in consonance with stuart hall's theories about identity (hall 1997: 3), and it eventually culminates in a period of illness which symbolises a painful maturation. Thus, Meena's long hospitalisation after falling off a horse in a distressing episode with anita initiates a healing process which makes her understand that she and anita &quot;had never been meant for each other&quot; (syal 1997: 282). in The Icarus Girl, sudden bouts of pain and fatigue leave Jess prostrated in bed, defenceless to Tilly's wishes. however, this helpless situation also contains a positive side in that it allows her to build strategies for overcoming her fears that will turn helpful in the future, such as that of imagining a &quot;safe place&quot; inside herself, supplied by her psychologist (oyeyemi 2006: 210, 243). it is the intervention of two parallel pairs of characters towards the end of the narratives that eventually prompts the solution to the conflicts, thus establishing what can be perceived as the most evident link between the two texts. The first of these characters is a new friend with whom a better communication is established: in The Icarus Girl it is a cheerful, understanding, white girl called shivs, who befriends Jess; in Anita and Me, a boy Meena meets while in hospital feels attracted to her &quot;exotic&quot; asian appearance and thus helps her to improve her shattered self-esteem, despite his reproduction of Western stereotypes about indian femininity. in both cases the disintegration of the former relationship is accelerated by jealousy. hence Jess's fondness for shivs leads to Tilly's jealous attempt to manipulate her into thinking that only people with a common ethnic background can understand each other (oyeyemi 2006: 217), thus showing once again the relevance of ethnicity as a major theme though here deployed with a manipulative end. in Anita and Me it is Meena who feels jealous of the new friendships anita has initiated without telling her, not only for the betrayal this represents but most importantly for the racist, skinhead ideology they exhibit:

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never been the one she loved, i was a convenient diversion, a practice run until the real thing came along to claim her. (syal 1997: 277)

The second parallel character that can be found in both narratives has even a more prominent role, as it is the one to bring peace to the protagonist and to strengthen her link with her ethnic community. in both cases this character is one of her parents' progenitors, brought from india to assist the family, as in Meena's Nanima, or visited in Nigeria, like Jessamy's grandfather. according to flanagan, grandparents can become important attachment figures and be helpful in periods of parental conflict due to the special emotional relationship they often develop with their grandchildren (1996: 121), a relationship which can be observed in both novels. furthermore, the fact that none of these two characters has gone through the experience of migration allows them to be interpreted as embodiments of the ancestral knowledge of their community and symbols of their &quot;untouched&quot; traditions. apart from awakening the protagonists' interest for their own ethnic origin, both characters develop very close relationships with their granddaughters which grant them a special understanding of the girls' personal plight. if Meena refers to her grandmother as &quot;some kind of sorcerer&quot; (syal 1997: 209), gifted as she is with the power of bringing harmony to the family, Jessamy's grandfather in The Icarus Girl gives her invaluable advice on the phone after miraculously divining the trouble she is going through: &quot;Two hungry people should never make friends. if they do, they eat each other up. it is the same with one person who is hungry and another who is full: they cannot be real, real friends because the hungry one will eat the full one. you understand?&quot; (oyeyemi 2006: 239-240). it is significant that Jessamy's grandfather should be the one to eventually rescue her from her friend's evil appropriation of her identity, which he achieves by resorting to yoruba folklore when he decides to take her to a so-called &quot;medicine woman&quot; and later when he places a symbol of her stillborn twin next to her as protection from evil influences.9 By including yoruba traditions as a vital element in the resolution of the conflict, the author is translating Nigerian values into a Western idiom, in a vindication of african culture. endowed with sudden strength, thanks ­ it is implied ­ to her grandfather's intervention, Jessamy finally defeats Tilly by overcoming her fear and being self-confident for the first time in her life. The ending of the novel, though not devoid of ambiguity, offers an optimistic note through the combination in the final sentence of the image of an awakening ­ from the nightmare experienced ­ and the reiteration of the preposition &quot;up&quot;: &quot;Jessamy harrison woke up and up and up and up&quot; (oyeyemi 2006: 322). as regards the conclusion of syal's novel, Meena's stay in hospital followed by the unexpected death of her boyfriend finally prompts a better valuation of her own self as well as an appraisal of her desires, as is proved when she conscientiously undertakes the revision for her eleven-plus exam in order to continue her education. her final reflection after her success, when she is moving to a grammar school and a better-off neighbourhood, reveals a more confident, mature Meena who is aware of her capacities and her position in the world:10

i now knew i was not a bad girl, a mixed-up girl, a girl with no name or no place. The place in which i belonged was wherever i stood and there was nothing stopping me simply moving forward and claiming each resting place as home. This sense of displacement i had always carried round like a curse shrivelled into insignificance against the shadow of mortality cast briefly by a hospital anglepoise lamp, by the last wave of a gnarled brown hand. i would not mourn too much the changing landscape around me, because i would be a traveller soon anyhow. (syal 1997: 303) hence both narratives conclude when the protagonist has freed herself from the influence of the evil friend, a moment which represents the final step towards the solution of her identity conflicts. choosing a harmful friend can thus be interpreted as a rite of passage for both Meena and Jessamy, since it brings about a painful period in their lives which finally allows them to mature and enables them to establish more fulfilling relationships in the future, free from their previous feeling of unbelonging as bicultural individuals. The motif of harmful friendship stands, therefore, as the central theme in both narratives, and is deployed in parallel ways with the authors' exploration of identity development in ethnic minority children. in their novels syal and oyeyemi resort to different settings and narrative styles which eventually produce two literary works of differing natures: one humorous and openly autobiographical, organised as the memories of the protagonist, and the other more serious and sombre, narrated from an external viewpoint. Nevertheless, the use of parallel episodes and situations in the initiation and termination of the friendship and of analogous characters who facilitate the resolution of the conflict are features which emphasise the parallel nature of the authors' approach to the themes of childhood friendship and ethnic identities. in addition, syal and oyeyemi, by deploying the motif of evil friendships, foreground the special vulnerability of second-generation migrants as a result of their location in what has been called the &quot;Third space&quot; of enunciation, a place in which self-definition requires a difficult negotiation between cultures (Bhabha 1994: 38). Thus, for Meena and Jessamy their ethnicity seems to be a serious burden at the beginning of the narrative, when both want to erase their indian and Nigerian origins, although by the end they have learnt a lesson about friendship and human behaviour and can go on with their lives as better prepared individuals. The authors' choice of age for the protagonists highlights the importance of identification and identity issues right before the onset of puberty, a period which is considered crucial in life from psychological perspectives. although friendships are always dynamic and in a continuous process of change (erwin 1998: 13), it is certainly in this period that they are most changeable and influential, since individual identity is then at its initial stages of formation. diasporic children in Western societies are all the more vulnerable in this situation due to the difficult space they inhabit as bicultural individuals. syal and oyeyemi offer in their novels a powerful exploration of these issues inscribing new preoccupations not only in the writing produced by ethnic minorities, but also in the well-established tradition of childhood fiction.

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1 This paper has been produced with the support of the research Group The Expression of Diversity in the English-Speaking World (university of the Balearic islands, spain). an early draft was presented at the Naes (Nordic association for english studies) conference held at the university of Bergen, Norway, on 24-26 May 2007. 2 Both novels received considerable attention at the time of their publication: Anita and Me was the winner of the Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for The Guardian Fiction Prize, whereas The Icarus Girl, initiated when oyeyemi was studying for her a-levels, was launched after she had been offered 400,000 for it (sethi 2005: 1), a sum which can be compared to that offered for Zadie smith's debut novel White Teeth (2000). 3 Bernardine evaristo's Lara (1997) and andrea levy's Never Far From Nowhere (1996) are other interesting examples of diasporic childhood narratives, although they will not be discussed here as they do not deal with friendship in a sustained way. 4 reviewers like ali smith have highlighted the use of this motif in the novel (smith 2005: 1). 5 actually, Meena's friendship with anita also entails being accepted by a group of peers, as anita's popularity makes her be always surrounded by other neighbouring girls and eventually form a gang (syal 1997: 138). 6 This image can also be found in other diasporic narratives by women such as andrea levy's Fruit of the Lemon (1999). 7 social class is another interesting issue tackled in the novel, as both Meena and anita grow up in a working-class neighbourhood. it is significant that at the end of the narrative the protagonist moves to a higher-class area, something impossible for anita's family which reflects the social mobility characteristic of the asian community in Britain. 8 according to flanagan, this phase covers the period between the ages of 10 and 12 approximately (1996: 124). 9 as recounted in the novel, according to Nigerian folklore twins inhabit three worlds: the physical world, the spirit world and a kind of &quot;wilderness of the mind&quot;, which makes them particularly vulnerable. it is common belief in yoruba culture that when one twin dies in childhood the surviving child must go through a rite: the family must offer a carving to the god of twins to make sure the dead one is peaceful and the one alive protected (oyeyemi 2006: 191-192). 10 The fact that both protagonists excel academically is highly significant: Meena passes her eleven-plus exam at the end of the narrative, being the first one in her neighbourhood to do so in many years; Jessamy has recently been moved one year above her age at school when the narration starts. This is proof of their maturity and will allow them better expectations in life as well as a greater social mobility.

childhood fiction has received great critical attention due to its exploration of identity development, a tendency which can also be observed in contemporary diasporic narratives dealing with the experience of ethnic minority children. Two of such narratives are Anita and Me (1996) by indian-British Meera syal and The Icarus Girl (2005) by Nigerian-British helen oyeyemi, both focused on the childhood experiences of two girls from ethnic minorities who grow up in racist societies. This essay surveys the connections that can be observed between both novels as they deploy the friendship motif in their depiction of the protagonists' identity conflicts after turning to damaging friendships for identification and approval. The assessment of the links between both narratives leads to insightful reflections regarding diasporic writing and identity formation in migrant children. KEYWORDS: identity, diasporic fiction, childhood narratives, friendship, ethnicity, Meera syal, helen oyeyemi.

association of applied linguistics of serbia faculty of philosophy, university of Novi sad

inTERnATiOnAl COnGRESS OF APPliED linGuiSTiCS

APPliED linGuiSTiCS TODAY: BETWEEn THEORY AnD PRACTiCE

October 31-November 1, 2009 Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad

The proposed sections are: 1. Theoretical issues 2. Linguistic theories in other fields 3. Methodology of foreign language teaching and learning 4. Contrastive analysis 5. Literature and applied linguistics 6. Culture and civilization in foreign language teaching 7. Languages in contact and applied linguistics The working languages of the Congress are English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian and the languages spoken in the former Yugoslavia. We would like to ask the members of the Association and other interested colleagues who wish to take part in the Congress to send the titles and abstracts of their presentations by April 30, 2009 to one of the following e-mail addresses: [email protected] or [email protected], or to the postal address: Snezana Guduri Department of Romance Studies Faculty of Philosophy Dr Zorana inia 2, 21000 Novi Sad, Serbia On behalf of the Organizing Committee, Snezana Guduri Chairman of the Association of Applied Linguistics of Serbia

SU M M A RY M u lT i pl e l ay e r s of i de N T i T y i N G au Ta M M a l K a N i`s NoV e l LON D ONSTA N I This paper analyses the complexities of multicultural society in contemporary london; it refers to a particular social and cultural milieu of the london borough of hounslow as described in Gautam Malkani,s novel Londonstani. it also examines various aspects of national, subcultural, personal and group identity of the major characters in the novel. KljucnE REci: identitet, drustvo, supkultura, tradicija, jezik, Britanci azijskog porekla.

`Kolo' is a folk dance that is performed at a specific time of the wedding ritual, showing its ritual role. It structures the space, making it safe and encircled. Its shape has a magical function since the circle makes the cosmic connection with the Sun, and becomes part of the Sun cult. Giving gifts to the dancers in kolo brings harmony between two families and also has a magical role. The dance has a social function as well. The place that the person takes in kolo shows their social status and social role. The belief that fairies, as protectors of wedding, often dance revives the mythical dimension of kolo. Nowadays the dance does not have so strong ritual and magical functions. They have been replaced by pure amusement. KLJUCNE RECI: Kolo, svadbeni rituali, magijske radnje, socijalni kontekst, komunikacija.

Aleksandra Nikcevi-Batrievi and Marija Knezevi (eds.), Culture-Bound Translation and Language in the Global Era, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 170 GENER AL DESCRIPTION This book comprises a selection of papers delivered at the Second International Conference on English language and literary studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro in September 2006. The authors of the papers are research scholars, linguists and academic teachers brought together by their interest in both translation and language studies. This book, pertaining to a wider interdisciplinary field of culture and language studies, explores various and heterogeneous aspects of translation and language that may be manifested in some plausible models for teaching translation and language through culture. The title of this collection, Culture-Bound Translation and Language in the Global Era, suggests the wide scope of linguistic investigation, and thus, it is hardly surprising that the papers touch upon a broad range of issues. Pointing out the attempts &quot;to contribute a further element of rigour into the discussion of cultural and linguistic studies&quot; and aiming at &quot;examin[ing] in detail some of the problems implied by the interaction between translation, language and culture while providing breadth and depth to cultural dimension&quot; (p. x), the authors set about exploring the relationship between translation and culture from one cross-cultural perspective, while also &quot;intend[ing] to offer insights to anybody else working or living between cultures and wishing to understand more about their cross-cultural successes and frustrations&quot; (p. x). The authors' insights into the complex phenomenon of cross-cultural communication is as interesting as fascinating, and perhaps even more so, due to the reason that the scholars, who have contributed to this book, come from various countries, including Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Latvia, Russia, Serbia and Slovenia. It goes without saying that the book reaches out towards a wide audience of university lecturers, linguists and research scholars whose theoretical or practical ambitions, goals and aspirations are driven not only by gaining a linguistic insight into how culture and language interact through translation from a purely didactical point of view, but also in how culture and certain translation strategies may be introduced more effectively in their own situations while assuming one more active role as mediators between cultures.

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The book opens with the introduction by Nick Ceramella which sets the scene: he provides a succinct presentation of the content of the book and furthermore, successfully sketches out the papers contained within the book, thus providing a good starting-point for readers. The book contains the Acknowledgments (p. ix), a list of contributors (161-165) and an index (167-170). The rest of the book is organized into two parts. PA R T I ­ &quot; T R A N S L AT I O N S T U D I E S &quot;

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This section contains five chapters, each one being a paper of a contributor. The first section opens with Nick Ceramella's paper entitled &quot;Linking Theory With Practice: The Way to Quality Translation&quot; (p. 3-32), in which he defines the research perspective and then presents translation as some sort of essence and a key to crosscultural communication in a global society. This research is a result of his extensive and vast teaching experience at various universities, and he relates them by way of illustration with examples. This paper tries to provide a systematic approach to training and teaching in the context of translation studies by drawing on some key cultural issues and linguistic theory and by relating the above said to a number of specific problems and strategies in connection with translation and language. This chapter closes with some considerations concerning grammatical and syntactical equivalence. In the second paper entitled, &quot;Translation and Mediation in Postmodern Mass Media Space: Problem Aspects&quot; (p. 33-53) Natalya Reinhold introduces the notions of both translation and mediation while dealing with translation in its own right as a form of intercultural communication. She wonders whether the current media-oriented order helps the mediation between the Other (in ST) and the I (in TC) while pointing out that &quot;[t]heir relationship can vary, from identifying oneself with the other to the mirror-like doubling of one's own `I'&quot; (p. 36). In addition to this, Reinhold supports her opinion by making reference to some English writers who hinted at the possibility of developing a word culture, as opposed to the relationship between the rapid evolving of visual and verbal signs. Finally, Reinhold concludes that &quot;[...] literary works, translations included, are intertwined with the jungle of clichés at all levels&quot;, and asks if it is &quot;[r] eally worth translating into another language&quot; (p. 52) for which she herself does not provide an answer. Tomaz Onic discusses some aspects of translating jokes in his paper entitled, &quot;Translation of Untranslatable Jokes: Linguistic and Cultural Barriers in Joke Translation&quot; (p. 55-65), while Olja Joji explores some instances of componential analysis in her paper entitled, &quot;Componential Analysis in Translation of Material Culture Terms from English into Serbian&quot; (p. 67-75). The first part closes with the paper entitled, &quot;Culture for Culturally Desensitized&quot; (p. 77-83) in which Michelle Gadpaille thoroughly observes some plausible ways of challenging first-year translation students who perhaps overestimate themselves with respect to their knowledge of English-speaking countries. PA R T I I ­ &quot; L A N G UAG E S T U D I E S &quot; This section, consisting of five chapters, is fully dedicated to language studies, while simultaneously being a selection of topics that show diversified potential

of language studies in the context of culture and/or translation. Allan James explores instances of some varieties of English in his paper entitled, &quot;Language and Culture: Lingua Franca ­ Cultura Franca? Sublingua Franca, Supralingua Franca? ­ International English and Issues of Form and Function&quot; (p. 87-94). He briefly states his objectives and methodology and then goes on to analyse some examples from his research. To this purpose, he draws a distinction between English as an International Language (EIL) and English as Lingua Franca (EFL) and then examines them with regard to the &quot;linguo-cultural functions they fulfill&quot; as well as with regard to the &quot;formal features they show [...]&quot; (p. 87). In an attempt to answer the question whether it is possible to establish a unitary model of tripartite distinction between &quot;languages&quot;, &quot;sublanguages&quot; and &quot;supralanguages&quot;, and how these &quot;languages&quot; interact, James has observed from the previously exposed, albeit limited, data whereas the sublingua franca (ESP), supralingua franca (ELF) are predominantly manifested by means of a particular use of vocabulary, syntax and morphology. To sum up, James has successfully shown that &quot;[a] suitably differentiated, layered and partialized view of language and culture and their relation to each other in the context of lingua franca might contribute to a fuller understanding of the various significances of English in international use&quot; (p. 93). A similar view with regard to culture is expressed in a paper entitled, &quot;Cultural Value Discrepancies in English Language Teaching: A Study of the British and Serbs&quot; (p. 95-113), in which Ana Vlaisavljevi analyses the fact that the growing global dominance of the English language &quot;[h]as led ELT as a profession to try to identify cultural and social assumptions underlying various teaching practices appropriated by the West&quot; (p. 95). The reader of this comprehensive paper is made aware of the previous studies and accounts dealing with value differences. Not surprisingly, some mentioned approaches to differences in cultural values between British and Serbs display opposing views as to the impact of imported modern practices applied to the Serbian educational system. However, the argumentation of Ana Vlaisavljevi is both convincing and well-supported due to specific and genuine examples from her empirical research. She fervidly, and yet rightly, points out that &quot;[t]he recognition of cultural value discrepancies when `importing' certain methodological constructs should be made&quot; (p. 112). Equally commendable and praiseworthy is Vlaisavljevi's Appendix (p. 114-116) in which various statistical data are shown. On the other hand, Natalija Cigankova focuses her attention on particular linguistic and extralinguistic features characterizing academic hypertext in her paper, entitled &quot;Academic Culture on the World Wide Web: Implications for Teaching Academic Writing&quot; (p. 117-136). The collected data may enable a researcher to identify the most distinctive medium-specific means of expression, and thus make some recommendations for academic writings on the World Wide Web. Although, academic standards should be preserved, she points out that &quot;[i] nnovation, in terms of computer-mediated academic discourse, should be a response to the technologically quickly changing academic world&quot; (p. 128). Quite originally, Cigankova closes with the strikingly appropriate citation of Winston Churchill. Radmila Sevi accounts for the (im)possibilities of creating a tenable theory of language change in her paper entitled, &quot;New Tools in Historical Linguistics&quot; (p. 137-151). The final chapter is an original, refreshing, inspiring and stimulating

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paper written by Dr. Biljana Cubrovi. True to its title &quot;Cultural and Linguistic Overlaps in Crnjanski's Novel About London&quot; (p. 153-160) this paper argues for one interdisciplinary approach pertaining to both cultural and linguistic studies, which according to this linguist usually, though not always necessarily overlap. Dr. Cubrovi focuses on the idiosyncratic nature of the English language and the peculiarities of English pronunciation in the context of Crnjanski's novel, while simultaneously discussing the opposing accounts of cultural and linguistic contacts. In addition to this, Dr. Biljana Cubrovi accurately and precisely points out that &quot;[l]anguages and cultures seem to form an inseparable whole in a linguistic community&quot; (p. 153). Taking into consideration the fact that &quot;[l]anguage and culture are indeed two different sides of one medal [...]&quot; she proposes &quot;[c]ertain inescapable parallels&quot; (p. 154) which may possibly bridge the gap between cultural and linguistic contacts. Drawing extensively on different theories from cultural studies, linguistics, and particularly morphology and phonology, and applying her original analysis to an imposing corpus the author touches on bilingualism (p. 155), then she explores assiduously the occurrence of mispronunciation in the novel (p. 156) and then thoroughly analyses lexical borrowings in the novel (p. 157). Also, she re-introduces Weinreich's hypothesis that an individual is the ultimate locus of [language] contact (p. 157). Apart from noticing that &quot;A Novel about London abounds in an inconsistent use of anglicisms belonging to various stages of adaptation [...]&quot; Dr. Cubrovi concludes, quite correctly, that &quot;[b]oth graphological and phonological rules are violated in the Serbian text, which create an effect of alienation of Crnjanski's characters&quot; (p. 159). Evidently, this successful interdisciplinary `fusion' of the assumed broad theoretical perspective and the choice and treatment of the particular linguistic phenomenon under investigation contributes to the theoretical and methodological coherence of her paper and results in conclusions which are both lucid and specific. It goes without saying that the research of Biljana Cubrovi is methodologically functional, thus making the overall value of this collection of papers very high.

The organization of this collection of papers is very clear, coherent, rational and consistent. Each paper offers an interesting analysis of some sort, and at the same time touches certain aspects of the interdisciplinarity. The argumentation of the authors is more than persuasive, impressive and convincing, and is further supported with various examples provided by the authors. Both traditions in the translation and language study areas are presented with their merits and flaws and, thus, come out as equally important. Broadly speaking, the authors of this collection met their primary aim &quot;to give scholars, and students of translation and language alike the opportunity to share the results of a very successful, international event [...]&quot; in order to &quot;[s]timulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field of applied linguistic research&quot; (p. xv). Finally, and by way of recapitulation, it may be concluded that the assumed interdisciplinary perspective of cultural and linguistic research has been illuminated by means of the results reached within these original papers, although this kind of research merits further broadening and further elaboration.

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UDK 811.111'342:061.3(497.11)&quot;2008&quot;

BIMEP 2008 (I Belgrade International Meeting of English Phoneticians) took place on the 27th and 28th of March 2008 in the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade and was organized by a group of teachers and student assistants from the English Department under the capable supervision of Dr Biljana Cubrovi. The comfortable size of the conference ­ about thirty papers were given over the two days in all ­ allowed participants to converse and socialize easily with the other delegates, which made for a consistently congenial atmosphere throughout the proceedings. Another advantage of the small size of the meeting was that there were no parallel sessions, which, when too numerous, can mar the atmosphere of a conference as delegates desperately shuffle between talks that have often been assigned to rooms in different parts of a building, or are in completely different locations and, in the end, only manage to get to know a limited number of people. The sessions were assigned to only two different rooms in the central Faculty of Philology building, so everybody was able to find their way around almost immediately. Moreover, the many helpful members of staff and students around the Faculty, no doubt proud to see their university used as the venue for an international event, made sure that nobody got lost and the sessions were able to operate within the designated time limits. The fact that Belgrade University, like many of the older seats of learning of its kind, is situated right in the heart of the city, meant that there was always time to visit the numerous bookshops on Knez Mihailova Street, a pedestrian thoroughfare right outside the backdoor leading to the English Department of the University. A wide range of nationalities were represented at the conference: there were representatives of countries as far apart as Japan, Iran and Switzerland, not to mention local delegates from various parts of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The papers were also very varied, covering a breadth of interests, taking in not only practical considerations of pronunciation of relevance to teaching, but more abstract issues of a phonological kind. For example, while Maja Markovi (Serbia) considered the different strategies that can be applied for acquiring L2 vowels, and Takehiko Makino (Japan) outlined vowel substitution patterns in Japanese speakers' English, Csaba Csides (Hungary) gave a paper on a radical offspring of Government Phonology, called &quot;strict CV-phonology&quot;, in which he claimed that consonantal positions alternate with vocalic positions in the phonological string, and that a parallel analysis can be applied to vowel-reduction and vowelzero alternation in English. In the same session as C. Csides, Alastair Wilson (Switzerland) took us to north-east England to familiarize us with some of the phonetic and phonological features of the speech of Darlington, County Durham,

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which has long been neglected owing to the attention devoted to its more powerful neighbour Geordie, spoken in the Newcastle area. Other topics which were dealt with were contrastive linguistics, use of British versus American English in Serbia, the phonological features of advertising slogans, and English lexical stress and intonation. Milos D. uri (Serbia) presented some acoustic properties of English and French vowels, while Erzsebet Balogh (Hungary), starting from the relatively marginal status of dental fricatives in the world's languages (she mentioned in particular Czech, Russian, French and German), discussed how Hungarian secondary-school learners of English replace these problematic segments with native sounds when reading an English text, and then proceeded to compare her findings with the results of previous studies on the same issue. Klementina Jurancic Petek's paper on the English of Slovenian learners afforded interesting data for the uninitiated on the differences between the Slavonic languages, referring as it did to the final vocalization and devoicing characteristic of Slovenian, but not found, in Serbian, for example. The comparative incidence of British and American English in Serbia, with particular reference to pronunciation tendencies, was reported on by Jelena Grubor and Darko Hini (Serbia). Mirna Vidakovi (Serbia) reported on her investigation into the phonological characteristics of advertising slogans in English and the problems related to their translation into Serbian, referring to alliteration, assonance, rhyme and sound symbolism. Contributions on the prosody of English were provided by Biljana Cubrovi (Serbia) and Ken-Ichi Kadooka (Japan). The latter underlined the complexity of English tunes compared to those of other languages like Japanese, which does not have the English compound melodies (fall-rise and rise-fall). Dr Cubrovi analysed the accentual patterns of recent French loanwords in English and laid emphasis on the variety of resolutions of French stress that one finds in English. In the second part of her paper, she pointed out the differences in stress patterns observed between American and British English in assigning stress to French loanwords, and attempted to account for the stress differences that exist in different accents of English. During the conference, two plenaries were given: one on Thursday 27th and one on Friday 28th. On Thursday, we were privileged to hear Professor Tvrtko Pri from the University of Novi Sad deliver a lecture on the pronunciation and spelling of English proper names in Serbian. Probably the most surprising thing for speakers of some languages other than Serbian was the fact that foreign names are transliterated in these languages, as well as being given a pronunciation more consonant with the local phonology, and are inflected for case like native names. On Friday, Dr Jane Setter of the University of Reading lectured on prosodic research into rhythm and intonation, with particular reference to Hong Kong English and Russian learner English on the one hand, and Chinese and Arab learner English on the other. Apart from the speakers mentioned above, there were other excellent contributors, and the standard of content and delivery throughout the conference was high. To complete the event, a dinner was provided on Thursday evening, round the corner from the Faculty of Philology at Aeroklub, and Primoz Jakopin (Slovenia) generously took photos of everybody, which he later put on the web. The whole thing ended with a snack after the last talk on Friday evening. I am sure that all those who attended are looking forward to the next BIMEP meeting.

The 9th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) was hosted by the Department of English of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, 22-26 August 2008. The ESSE conference is the largest regular gathering in English studies in Europe. The ESSE-9 attracted 450 participants. This ESSE conference was a major event in this part of Europe judging by the fact that the participants came from all over the world: Poland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Switzerland, Romania, Russia, Italy, Spain, Serbia, Netherlands, Portugal, UK, Ireland, Belgium, Hungary , USA, Hong Kong, Algeria, Jordan, etc. The first chapter of the University of Aarhus' history began in 1928 and ever since it has been developing steadily into one of the leading European universities. The buildings of the University of Aarhus are gathered in and around the University Park and through the years they have multiplied considerably and today they have the total floor area of 246,000 m2. In a harmonius interplay with the rolling hills of the park, the uniform red brick buildings of the Nobel Park complex provided congenial and stimulating atmosphere throughout the proceedings. Various talks were assigned to rooms in different buildings in the Nobel Park complex which enabled participants to circulate freely between the sessions, meeting great number of people or strolling by the lake in the University Park.When presenting their papers participants respected the designated 15-20 minute limit and a fruitful discussion ensued afterwards. Doors were kept open in all the sessions, giving opportunity to people to shuffle between different talks without disturbing the proceedings. Dr Dominic Rainsford, the Chair of Academic Programme Committee and Local Orginizing Committee, supervised everything and made sure that the proceedings ran smoothly and flawlessly. Many student assistants were always ready to step in to point the participants in the right direction or to provide them with laptops for the Power Point presentation or some other special technical equipment. The conference participants had the opportunity to present their papers in: seminars, round tables or poster sessions. There were 47 seminars, 10 round tables and 24 poster sessions. Therefore the papers were very varied covering a wide range of topics. For example, seminar 1: Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Approaches to Phrasaeology focused on new theoretical perspectives and the latest developments in phrasaeology, including stylistic investigations in this field. Seminar 2 Censorship across Borders: The Reception of English Literature in the Twentieth-century Europe explored the official reception and censorship of many famous writers like Joyce and Orwell in the twentieth-century Europe, taking into account the social, political and

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historical context and analysing the extent to which censorship was determined by national and international concerns. Seminar 3: The House of Fiction as the House of Life: Representation of the House in Literature and Culture, 1700-1900, explored the literary, visual and cultural representations of the house and the construction of the domestic space from divergent disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Since from Paradise Hall to Howard's End, the house offers a deeply complex model of the world and may be taken as the shifting expression of a zeitgeist, the topics included the poetics of rooms, professional domesticity, the house as the landscape of existence, etc. As for the literature some other seminars included: Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe; From Hell to Paradise: The Lure of the Occult and its Cultural Representation; Wholeness, Healing, and Spirituality: African American Women's Revisions; British Poetry and Pop; Continuation or Change? Literature in English in the New Millenium; Life Writing, Writing Lives; Towards the Bicentenary: New Bearings in European Dickens Criticism; Writing-Machines and Literature, etc. Regarding the language, some of the seminars included: Lingua Franca English in Use; The Impact of Lingua Franca English; Modern English Syntax: Historical and Comparative Approaches; Focusing on a Linguistics of Difference: Intercultural and Contrastive Approaches; Meaning Construction: Functionalist, Cognitivist and Constructionist, etc. Round tables included the following interesting topics: Making Use of Electronic Collections: Problems of Selection and Description; What's So Special about Literature? Literariness, Cognition and Ethics revisited; EL Domains: Losses or Gains?; Britain After Blair; Ideology and Metaphor, etc. The poster sessions ranged from: The 'Gospel of Work and Wealth' in the Catholic and the Protestant Economic Discourse to Mythological and Religious Influences on Tolkien's Middle-Earth. Five plenaries were given during the conference. On the first day of the conference we were honoured to hear Mark Turner, from the Case Western Reserve University, giving the lecture on 'Conceptual Blending in Language and Literature'. On the second day, Jenny Uglow, from the University of Warwick, delivered the lecture on 'Words and Pictures: Milton and Bunyan, Epic and Chapbook'. Nigel Fabb, from the University of Strathclyde, lectured on 'What Is a Line of Verse?' on the third day of the conference. On the fourth day of the conference, we were privileged to hear Steven Connor, from the University of London, talking about 'Thinking Things'. On the fifth day, Toril Moi, from the Duke University, gave lecture on 'Early Modernism? Reflections on British Literary History 1870-1914'. The conference was crowned with an excursion to Rosenholm Castle and the conference dinner. The Castle is the home of the Rosenkrantz family, the very same one whose member was made one of the characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It was a custom for all the noble families of that time to send their offspring to travel around Europe to visit the most renowned universities and cities. One member of the Rosenkrantz family managed to visit London and allegedly met Shakespeare himself. This family still to this very day occupy one wing of the Castle. When everything is considered, the ESSE-9 was a very memorable event in both educational and cultural sense. Let's hope that all the organizers of the future ESSE conferences will live up to the standards set up in Aarhus, Denmark.

Dr Jaroslav Kusnír Born 1962 Associate Professor University of Presov at Presov, Slovakia, Faculty of Humanities and Natural Sciences, Department of English Language and Literature Areas of academic interest: American and Australian postmodern and contemporary fiction, translation studies, literary theory and criticism E-mail: [email protected]